Words by Cordelia Lam
Stepping into London’s packed-out EartH Theatre, Mustafa ascends the stage dressed in something of a uniform for him: a bulletproof vest emblazoned with the word ‘POET’. It’s a stark image, a reminder of the warring forces that converge within his one person: softness and rage; violence and poetry.
The poet and singer-songwriter is here to share his debut full-length album ‘Dunya’, which translates roughly from Arabic as “the material world in all its flaws”. It’s an expansive ambition, to name an album after the very condition of the human world, but for Mustafa, it’s a fitting thesis, a context for “all the sorrow on the record, all the worlds it holds within it.”
Many worlds move within Mustafa Ahmed. Born and raised in Toronto to Sudanese parents, he grew up with two brothers and three sisters in the neighbourhood of Regent Park, one of Canada’s oldest and largest public housing projects. As a child he began to write poems, introduced to the form by his sister as an emotional and creative outlet. The young boy’s poetry gained critical acclaim nationwide, marking the beginnings of his early moniker ‘Mustafa the Poet’ and an artistic life that would remain intertwined with words. His foray into music began in the 2010s as a member of Toronto hip hop collective Halal Gang, followed by a burgeoning career writing songs for artists including The Weeknd, Justin Bieber, Shawn Mendes, Camila Cabello and the Jonas Brothers in collaboration with Toronto producer Frank Dukes.
Those different spheres converge on this album, interconnected in all their darkness and light. Regent Park. His older brother, who was murdered in the same neighbourhood last year. The communities that both nurtured and failed him. His parents’ native Sudan, a homeland from which he is separated by inevitable distance. The stirring force of his Muslim faith, a source of both liberation and constraint. And, through it all, the solace he has found in poetry and language.
“If I had figured out my relationship to Islam, there wouldn’t be an album”
Mustafa’s first musical project, 2021’s ‘When Smoke Rises’, was about the lives of others. Named in memory of his friend and fellow Halal Gang member Smoke Dawg, who was killed in Regent Park in 2018, it chronicled the struggles and charms of life in Canada’s oldest public housing development. “Even though I don’t live in the hood anymore, growing up there still dictates how I move through the world today,” Mustafa recalls over the phone to NME from his London hotel, a few hours before his London listening session at EartH. With a striking softness amid the heaviness of its subject matter, ‘When Smoke Rises’ established the folk textures, aching vocals and tender instrumentation from which ‘Dunya’ builds and, enriched in range, depth and experimentation by collaborators including The National’s Aaron Dessner and composer Nicolas Jaar (among others), now grows.
“I just don’t have it in me to write the attack,” Mustafa reflects. “No matter how much rage I approach the process with, it’s always translated into a kind of grace. Writing the songs forms the blueprint for how I walk back into those memories. In that way, it serves as a great mercy upon me.”
His sound stretches further on ‘Dunya’, with Middle Eastern and African instruments threaded through its fabric and fusing seamlessly with the record’s wider folk, pop and experimental sensibilities. Centrepiece track ‘I’ll Go Anywhere’ is swept forward by a propulsive oud arrangement, its strings backed by Flamenco claps lent by his friend Rosalía. African masenqo and krar make their presence felt through the record, the whole thing a moving tapestry of influences coalescing around Mustafa’s voice – husky, urgent, heavy with the weight it carries. As a Canadian-born son of Sudanese immigrants, he says, “the fragmented form in which these pieces of heritage show up on the record is how they actually show up” in his identity.
More capacious than its predecessor, ‘Dunya’ zooms out a step from the politics and violence of Regent Park and reckons with infinitely unknowable subjects like community, religion and death in Mustafa’s distinctly emotive, episodic style. It’s more internal, too, a searching and vulnerable foray through the artist’s innermost fears, doubts and dreams.
There’s a devotional quality to the album, a yearning and reverence for faith that gently pours through its fibres, from the lushness of ‘I’ll Go Anywhere’ to the swooning force of ‘Imaan’. Despite that, “I actually don’t feel faithful at all right now,” Mustafa tells NME on the day that we speak. He is audibly worn down from weeks of album promotion, scarcely a few hours into arriving in London from Paris and due to leave for New York the next day. He largely manages his own schedule and work commitments himself, especially when it concerns something as personal to him as this album. Despite that, though, he’s candid and generous in conversation, the vulnerability and poetry in his words as present through the phone as if spoken in person.
“The closest I felt to God was probably when I was 12 years old, a time when I knew nothing else and wasn’t yet tainted by the horrors through which I would see the world later. So much of my journey to God is through trying to forgive the world around me in order to reach him.”
“Even if I wasn’t making music for others, I’d still be doing it to try and make sense of the world”
“In a lot of ways, that’s what I’m trying to do with the record,” he continues. “There are people who get frustrated with me for not being the ‘referential Muslim’ [by some interpretations, music is prohibited under Islam]. But the search for my faith is exactly why I’m making this music. If I had figured out my relationship to Islam, there wouldn’t be an album.”
A central inquiry repeats on album opener ‘Name of God’: “Whose lord are you naming? When you start to break things… Did you do it in the name of God?” He undertakes his search by way of questions to the night sky; pleas for truth that remain unanswered but which bring a different kind of closure through the act of asking itself. “There’s nothing in my life that I’m not questioning,” he says. “These times we’re living in are relentless. I just read today that the US state of Missouri decided to execute a man who is innocent.” He’s speaking of Marcellus Williams, a death row inmate who was executed the day before we speak, despite his 2001 murder conviction being contested and subject to high-profile calls for intervention. “Even if I wasn’t making music for others, I’d still be doing it to try and make sense of the world.”
Throughout his life, Mustafa has relied on the bonds of community for survival, solidarity and strength. In tribute to his friends on ‘SNL’ (short for ‘Street N***a Lullaby’), he sings: “I really feel like it’s only us in this city”. Buoyed by a loving circle of artists, poets and childhood friends, he’s known for gathering people. This year, he brought together musicians including Clairo, Daniel Caesar, King Krule and FKA Twigs for benefit concerts in aid of Gaza and Sudan. Many of them rallied around him again on ‘Dunya’, with Caesar (‘Leaving Toronto’) and Clairo (‘Hope is a Knife) providing backing vocals, amongst countless other friends and collaborators.
But Mustafa is under no illusions about community. He knows it is anything but a panacea. “We mention community so often, but I feel a great weight to interrogate the true meaning of it in my own life. Are we keeping each other safe? Are we actually upholding the tenets that make community real?” he says.
The tragic murder of his brother Mohamed in Regent Park last year, reportedly by a longtime acquaintance, shattered Mustafa’s relationship with his first and primary community. The enormity of that loss is the heartbreaking force behind ‘Leaving Toronto’, a quietly seething ballad that redraws the lines between him and the city he once considered home. “I would drown this whole city if I could”, he laments. “If we’re burning this city, tell me where to start.”
He confides that his brother had briefly moved back to Sudan in the hope of starting a new life there. But amidst the region’s violent conflict, he had returned again to Toronto. Mustafa reflects: “It’s a reminder that we are all connected to every war. Had there not been a genocide underway in Sudan, perhaps my brother would have stayed. Maybe he wouldn’t have come back to the place that took his life.” And if, one day, the city takes Mustafa, too? “Make sure they bury me next to my brother,” he instructs on ‘Leaving Toronto’.
“Sometimes it feels like I’m only seen as the result of what I have escaped”
“I don’t hate Toronto in the way the song makes it seem,” says the artist, who is now based primarily in Los Angeles. “I hate that I can’t live there anymore. People in that city have threatened my family’s lives and made good on those threats. The police and judicial system there have consistently rendered my community invisible. And to be clear, that’s not been the fault of the system. It’s the function of the system.”
“The paranoia has taught members of our community to justify our own endings,” he continues. “People want to believe that there’s a reason a young boy can be killed at 18, that a kid can be shot in the head for smoking weed or getting into a fight outside a bar. They can’t stomach that they live in a vulnerable community in a state of emergency. That does something to your psyche. The system demonises and ostracises my community, and I’ve witnessed the community do the same thing to our own people.”
Every now and then, in lighter moments of conversation, when his voice shakes with excitement or he breaks into laughter, you remember that this is a young man you’re talking to. Mustafa is still only 28. He jokingly recalls: “A record executive once asked me, ‘Are the songs always going to be sad?’ I actually liked that moment. I realised I’d come face to face with the kind of vintage executive who’s rare these days; the others are all smart about playing identity politics now, which I actually hate even more. This guy was just nakedly revealing to me what he truly believes. I looked at him and said, ‘Well, if the circumstances persist, surely the songs will remain this way.’”
The exec dug deeper. “It’s just that the songs have a real ache to them, and I’m wondering if it’s going to be like that in the future.” Mustafa didn’t hesitate: “Do you know what the future holds for a young Black Muslim?”
There’s a refrain on ‘Imaan’ that goes: “I know that you can’t hold me, but just hold me.” It’s a plea for somewhere to go, a way to be, to be held just as he is for a moment. “I really do want that,” Mustafa considers. “Sometimes it feels like I’m only seen as the result of what I have escaped, the end of some traumatic arc, or only in terms of where I’m going. I think the greatest capacity in which I can be held is just as a person. Then, I can be infinite. Then, I can move.”
Mustafa’s ‘Dunya’ is out now via Jagjaguwar
Listen to Mustafa’s exclusive playlist to accompany The Cover below on Spotify and here on Apple Music
Words: Cordelia Lam
Photography: Stella Gigliotti
Styling: Priya Howlader
Label: Jagjaguwar