Arooj Aftab is queen of the night

Born in Riyadh to music-loving diplomats (whom she praises as “cool cats”) and raised in Lahore, Arooj Aftab studied at Berklee College of Music in Boston; she now lives in Brooklyn. She worked in relative obscurity (an Emmy for documentary editing notwithstanding) for years before her 2021 album Vulture Prince gave wings to her career. Its mixture of jazz introspection and her commanding, controlled singing struck a chord with audiences who might never usually listen to music that she herself describes as crossing “jazz with minimalism, South Asian semi-classical music and folk music”. She became the first Pakistani musician to win a Grammy, for the song “Mohabbat” — which also became one of Barack Obama’s summer playlist picks. 

Vulture Prince was steeped in grief, for the deaths of her brother Maher and her friend Annie Ali Khan. Its centripetal stillness and Aftab’s sombre singing, largely in Urdu, suited the times. Its follow-up, Night Reign, was released earlier this year — recognisably in the same sound world but more open and energetic. This summer, she made a repeat appearance at Glastonbury in a dazzling gold frock coat, joking about playing songs about the night in blazing afternoon sunshine. This autumn she’ll perform at London’s Roundhouse as part of a wider European tour. But today, in a pub in east London, quick and sarcastic in sunglasses she never removes and nursing a festival injury in the form of a broken finger, she reflects on her inspirations, her past and the enduring power of whiskey and perfume.

Your last two records are both nocturnal in mood, but Vulture Prince was inward-focused and grieving; Night Reign more outward-looking. You’re inquisitive, you’re looking out at the world.

That’s spot-on. Vulture Prince was dark, and very soft in grief and loss. Inviting you into this space where there was something missing, or something had left. I was trying to create a new style of music that had no blueprint and no reference to other artists. And when I had built that house, I felt a sense of accomplishment and freedom.

With Night Reign, I was like, “Now I can decorate this house, I can play in this place, I can build on this thing that I’ve made, I can explore more this genre I have been searching for.” And my grief has developed, my sense of loss has kind of transformed into a sense of celebration of life. Instead of feeling the absence of someone, I now feel their presence through me. So I’m happy. I’m celebrating and I feel free. Night Reign makes the night the protagonist. You give up your autonomy to whatever happens in the night. And so many things happen.

How much of your interior mental landscape was formed in Lahore? 

Historically, Lahore is called the city of gardens, of poets, of dancers, of literature. Everybody loved music. Poets would congregate in cafés. Lahore has that Punjabi, Kashmiri culture of dressing up and dancing and partying and innocence. And then it’s really romantic because it has so many gardens, it has fragrant flowers, and fountains and marble and all that old Mughal red brick, and old British churches.

I will always have this relationship with Lahore as if it’s like an ex. You know, we had a good time. We still respect each other a lot. But we can never go back to how it was. The physical place no longer feels as important to me. You’re setting yourself up for heartbreak to tie yourself to a physical place, because that place keeps changing. So I stopped doing it.

How does Brooklyn contrast with that?

I’m so glad to call New York home. Everybody’s just on top of each other — it’s like a melting pot of culture, struggle, hustle, competition. And also inspiration, because all of the greatest artists in the world stop in New York and give New York a performance. There are freedoms there that I don’t find anywhere else in the world. They have a fighting spirit for what they believe is right.

A concept that runs through Night Reign is the Queen of the Night.

The Queen of the Night is someone who has this very alluring, magnetic energy in a gathering, or maybe even just catches your eye on the street. And it’s just a passing moment. It’s nothing more than that. But for the next month, you find you’re thinking about them. 

Tessa Thompson’s video for “Raat Ki Rani” encapsulates all that. [Directed and co-conceived by the actor, it is set on a film shoot, with Aftab positioned on the sidelines as an unobserved commentator.]

I loved the idea of the actor and their stand-in. They are essentially there until the very last moment, where you then step into the frame. And there’s an attraction there, which could be even being attracted to yourself, because your stand-in is your height and your skin tone. I loved the centre of desire not being a man. 

The Queen of the Night is also a flower, after which “Raat Ki Rani” is named. 

Yeah. Things that inspire me are flowers as metaphor, people’s eye contact, elemental things like the night or the day or rain, and fragrance.

To accompany Vulture Prince you sold your own perfume oil. 

I had [Egyptian-Lebanese perfumier] Dana El Masri listen to the record and I told her what I think the Vulture Prince would be wearing. She developed that scent with me. 

What did it smell of? 

A little bit like Earl Grey, kind of smoky, not powdery at all, a little sweet, kind of like a wintry-night dark scent. I was like: let’s not make something obvious, like incense, let’s make it really sexy. It has to smell fucking great because the Vulture Prince is a cool little cat. Woody, but kind of unisexual. 

At your Barbican concert in 2022, your costume was halfway between a crow and a suit of armour. Maeve [Gilchrist, the harpist who has been a long-time collaborator on her albums] looked like an off-duty astronaut. Maybe the men hadn’t pushed the boat out quite so much …

— as usual —

. . . so how important is costume for you?

It’s a way of being confident and taking up space on stage. There’s an edginess, a kind of dry wit. When you combine all of those things, it ends up looking like that crow outfit with a pretty strong silhouette. You should walk on stage and people be like, “whoa”, you know? But then, also the look has to match what’s going on. It can’t be a bad performance and just looking great.

You’ve said before that you are uneasy with the concept of world music. 

Am I? It’s not that I’m uneasy with it, I’m just not that. I’m not playing traditional music on stage — I’m just not. You can go see Abida Parveen or Ballaké Sissoko, maybe even Baaba Maal. But I’m not trained in anything classical at all. My music is a mixture of so many things. It’s quite contemporary. Just because I’m of colour and singing in a different language doesn’t mean that I should be put in the world-music category. 

When you’re singing, what’s going on in your head?

It feels like I’m in my own movie. I am telling a story, a vague story with a lot of secrets in it, open to interpretation. It could be many different situations but it is definitely all true about my life. Some of it is borrowed poetry, so I spend a lot of time with that poetry to make it my own, so that I’m able to sing it honestly. Sometimes it’s easier to sing your feelings and the things you want to say, rather than speak them out loud. It’s kind of romantic to have a song about a situation, instead of actually dealing with it.

“Whiskey”, for example …

I loved writing that because, on the one hand, it is very blaming: “You drink too much whiskey, and I’m gonna let you fall in love with me. And it’s your perfume.” But in a way, I’m also talking about myself. I’ve lived long enough now, at this point, that I’ve had multiple types of experiences — and it’s nice that it can all fit into that phrasing. There are many doors, right?

On tour, do you get inspiration from new places?

We travel so much and that has made me detached from places, because you just can’t catch feelings. You have to keep moving. It’s a little sad, because I feel like I could live in some of these little cities, in Brazil or in Portugal, or some tiny Italian towns, and just be a parallel-universe me. It’s probably happening somewhere . . . 

Arooj Aftab will headline Pitchfork Festival London on 7 November at Roundhouse, London NW1

Hair, Ami Fujita using Oribe. Make-up, Kite Luck at Agency 41. Photographer’s assistants, Emma Ercolani and Isabella Galliano. Stylist’s assistant, Lizzie Ash. Shot at The George Tavern, London E1