Get to Know Arooj Aftab, the Defiant Singer Who’s Reimagining Traditional South Asian Music for Today

Known for her rapturous performances, Pakistani singer Abida Parveen is one of the most revered musicians in South Asian history. The 67-year-old is often referred to as the Queen of Sufi Music, a form of devotional Muslim poetry and song that pursues enlightenment via a deep, mystical relationship with God. So it takes a lot of guts to knock on Parveen’s door uninvited and proceed to partake in an impromptu singing session with her. In 2010, Arooj Aftab did just that.

Both musicians were scheduled to play the Sufi Music Festival in New York when Aftab tracked down Parveen’s hotel room number and made her move. Parveen recognized the then-25-year-old musician from a festival audition, welcomed her by grabbing her hand and giving her cookies, and eventually pulled out a harmonium so they could sing together. At one point, Aftab, who had just moved to New York City and was trying to find her footing, asked her hero, “What should I do with my life?” Parveen responded, “Listen to my albums.”

This story of fearlessness fits into Aftab’s description of herself as a rowdy rule-breaker who curses and drinks whiskey. As she sits in the hushed backyard of Brooklyn bar Lovers Rock on a blustery April afternoon, she is as likely to drop an errant F-bomb as she is to finely consider how her music redefines the cultural connotations of certain instruments. We start talking an hour before the bar opens—she lives close by and is a regular—and the sunlit haven is quiet enough to hear hanging plants rustle in the breeze. Aftab is wearing a green pinstripe blazer, T-shirt, and thick eyeliner. A beige, potentially dead, vine sprawls across the black fence behind her.

She’s quick to laugh heartily when sharing thoughts on contemporary Bollywood music or joking about how much South Asians love Kylie Minogue, but she’s also comfortable with silence, giving concise responses rather than filling the space with the personal minutiae or mundane half-formed observations that often dot conversations between strangers. When asked what she was like as a teenager, Aftab, now 36, quickly responds “the same” before pausing and then elaborating ever so slightly. “I was a little bit different from the rest. Being queer was a thing—everybody else was just so straight by default. But I was popular, I was very much in the hang, just making jokes and being a little sensitive.” She is especially careful to avoid imprecise or overgeneralized descriptions of her work and intentions, bristling at memories of being defined by anyone but herself. “I don’t want things to be too obvious” is a phrase she says often.

Aftab’s new album Vulture Prince honors and remagines centuries-old ghazals, a form of South Asian poetry and music that she grew up listening to with her family. The artform meditates on the intense longing caused by separation from God, and Aftab either sets this poetry to original music or entirely transforms existing songs, eschewing the frenetic South Asian instrumentation typical of the originals for minimalist orchestral arrangements. She is insistent that people not oversimplify or misunderstand her practice: “People ask, ‘Is this an interpolation? Is this song a cover?’ No, it’s not. It’s very difficult to do this, it has taken a lot of time and energy as a musician, so it’s not a fucking cover. I’m taking something that’s really old and pulling it into the now.”

The care she pours into her solo work translates to her musical collaborations, too. Acclaimed jazz musician and Harvard professor Vijay Iyer met Aftab at a show where they spontaneously started playing together and, in his words, “created this thing that felt like it was meant to exist.” Now they’re in a trio with bassist Shahzad Ismaily called Love in Exile. Iyer describes their working relationship as one defined by attention, both musical and emotional. “Music can be a way of holding and being held by other people, and that’s how it feels like when we play together,” he says. “She has this deep reservoir of emotion that’s coming from a haunted place. She makes something beautiful, but it’s not just beauty for its own sake. It’s actually beauty as a form of care.”

Aftab was born in Saudi Arabia and lived there with her mom, dad, and two brothers until she was 11, when the family moved back to her parents’ hometown of Lahore, Pakistan. She describes her close relatives and their friends as “fiendy music lovers” who would sit down and listen to rare recordings of legendary Qawwali singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and have deep conversations about what they heard. She listened to Pakistani semi-classical music with them, as well as singer-songwriters like Jeff Buckley on her own. It always felt normal for her to make up melodies and sing them around the house.

By the time Aftab was a teenager, she knew she wanted to be a musician but didn’t know how to make that a reality. When she was 18, she took things into her own hands and recorded a hushed, jazzy cover of “Hallelujah.” This was the early 2000s, before YouTube and social media, but the cover started circulating via email and file-sharing sites like Napster and Limewire. Aftab says it was the first song to go viral online in Lahore, illuminating a pathway forward for women and independent musicians there. It also gave her confidence in her own abilities. She applied to Boston’s Berklee College of Music and got in.

After studying music production and engineering at Berklee, she moved to New York City, where she’s been living and performing for the last decade. In 2015, she released her debut, Bird Under Water, a murky fusion of jazz and Qawwali. She followed that project up with 2018’s Siren Islands, a collection of four ambient electronic tracks that weave in distorted snippets of Urdu lyricism. For her next album, Aftab desperately wanted to make music that aligned more with her personality; she hated being defined as saintly and mystical, and planned on releasing an album that was edgy and danceable. She named that in-progress record—a collection of songs she had been working on for years, some dating as far back as 2012—Vulture Prince, after a character who is, she explains, “not the king or the queen but this androgynous, sexy dude—one who is kind of dark, because vultures eat people, but they’re also an ancient bird.”

But when her brother and a close friend both died in 2018, the tone of the music shifted. She cut some songs from the album and meticulously rearranged the instrumentation on others, taking out all the percussion and adding in wandering violin interludes, wailing synth flourishes, and what she refers to as “heavy metal harp.” In order to ensure what she was writing was entirely her own sound, she didn’t listen to any music for two years while working on Vulture Prince.

The resulting record is far from the high-energy dance music she once imagined, but there’s still a boldness in the way the songs demand your attention. The lyrics are humid with imagery of stolen glances on starry nights and catastrophic heartache during the monsoon season, and Aftab sings each word with a hushed urgency. Despite the epic emotion of it all, she specifies that Vulture Prince has a history before and after the trauma she’s experienced. It is not defined by grief but rather, the moments when “you accept your losses as part of your life, instead of pointing at them.”

Sitting behind a wooden folding table at Lovers Rock, Aftab says she comes here often on weeknights, drinking, decompressing, and engaging in the long ruminative process that accompanies her musical composition. As the afternoon fades, she pulls out a small vial from her blazer pocket. It’s the perfume that she’s selling to accompany Vulture Prince. She dabs it on my wrist. The scent is hard to make out through a mask, but later on I notice hints of ginger and plum. She sent the perfumer who made it a long list of themes and moods that define the album for her: ’90s Lahore, huge oak trees, seasonal fruit, fire worship, empty space, Purple Rain. These references flow together like a kind of meta poem about nostalgia and longing, what we can hold and what we can only understand in its absence.

“What is heritage?” Aftab asks at one point. “It is the culture you inherit. So if you’re moving to different societies, you’re inheriting these things that become your heritage, become what your music sounds like, become what you move around like.” Her music, then, exists in the Pakistan of her youth and the Brooklyn of today, in the loss of a loved one and the people you are before and after that too.

Arooj Aftab: I was really sad and confused. I wanted to study music and I didn’t know how. Berklee College seemed really expensive and far away, and no one understood. My dad was talking about how some people think that they want to do music but they actually just really like music. I didn’t know what to do and I was listening to this song and decided to sing it with all my heart. I just felt so tired of the world.

I had no way to pave a path for myself in Lahore and I wasn’t really down to fight the fight as a female musician at the time. I didn’t have the tools yet. I was like, “I’m going to go then I’ll come back. I don’t have a band, I don’t have anything. And these people are the patriarchy, so this is just not going to work out. I have to go and learn somewhere else where no one’s going to be on my head saying, ‘You’re stupid, you don’t know math.’”

Sometimes I’m like, “Were those the voices in my head? Was that implied?” Societies can imply something without saying something. There was this general confusion about what it meant to want to study music. It’s the same if I had decided to say, “OK, I want to be an archaeologist.” There’s just no path. How are you going to go about doing that? You’re going to have to leave. I didn’t care what people were saying because I knew they were wrong. I knew something that they didn’t know.

Yeah, it lives in a different place in your mouth, in your entire body. Everything changes a little bit—the intonation and inflection, the accent, the diction. I don’t take a lot of risks when I’m singing in English. I’ve developed a vocal agility and created my own sound in Urdu. It took a lot of time and deep listening to get there, and in English I would like to spend more time figuring out what my own sound is. People say that I sound like Sade, and I’m like, “That’s not good. You shouldn’t sound like somebody else.” They shouldn’t be able to just point it out like that.

It starts with the melody, which dictates the harmonic structure. And then I’m always thinking about what will be the lead instruments. In a lot of music, it’s drums, guitar, and bass, but a lot of Vulture Prince is harps. The harp is very angelic and bright. I love it but it’s so beautiful that it can be cheesy and annoying. I was into this idea of taking the instrument out of its comfort zone and making it darker-sounding, playing really strange chords and throwing in some dissonance.

I’m always searching for instrument players who get what I’m saying, because I approach them like, “I need you to play this instrument that you’ve been playing forever in a way that it’s not the instrument.” I don’t want things to be too obvious.

I wasn’t thinking, “Oh, write this and put it onto Vulture Prince.” It was just happening as a process of my own grief, and made sense that it should go in an album even though it’s just voice and guitar. It’s something I didn’t even really instrumentalize. It’s an incomplete song. It grew legs and walked into the album itself. I woke up and had the voice note of the melody there.

Vaguely. When that stuff happened, I became very solitudinal. It wasn't dark or anything, I was just thinking. I have a patio in my house and I would just sit there and look at the garden and drink whiskey. I wasn’t crying. I don’t think my state of mind was sad. One of the nights, I looked through our emails and saw that she had sent me this poem. I was reading the poem and drinking. I was by myself, and I guess I started to sing it. Then I went to bed. I saw the voice recording the next day and I was like, “This is so beautiful.”

The trio I’m in with Vijay and Shahzad, Love in Exile, went into the studio and recorded an album, so we’re trying to put that out. And I’m working on my fourth album. I’m interested in this woman Chand Bibi. She was this feminist from the Deccan Empire. She was one of the first women whose poetry was published, and her book of poems went viral back in the day. I’m in the research phase of figuring out who this woman is, who she is to me, trying to live with her for a little bit. No one has ever composed her poetry, so this is going to be completely new.