As a child, Ali Sethi was enthralled watching Sufi whirling – a religious dance – at nearby shrines in Punjab: “There’s this collective catharsis that takes place and, briefly, your caste, class, gender, appearance, they stop mattering. You have licence in an otherwise extremely hierarchical society to just express yourself.”
This is something the 41-year-old Pakistani-American singer, songwriter and composer hopes to create himself. Though he’s also a writer – be that his acclaimed 2009 novel, The Wish Maker, or contributions to publications such as the New Yorker – music became somewhere Sethi could be accepted, especially as a queer person growing up in Lahore. “I think music has this shamanic function in south Asian culture,” he says, “where things you cannot say in lay language you say in the love language of music.”
Sethi’s stratospheric, shiver-inducing voice dissolves cultural divides. Take Intiha, his sublime 2023 experimental album of Sufi poetry with Chilean-American musician Nicolás Jaar, or 2022’s Pasoori, a bombastic raga-meets-reggaeton track which has surpassed a billion streams on YouTube Music, making it easily the biggest song to come out of Pakistan this century. When we speak, Sethi is about to release his debut solo album, Love Language, which builds on Pasoori’s thundering, Technicolor global pop. Working with producers like Brockhampton’s Romil Hemnani and Colombian musician Juan Ariza, it’s exuberant and almost oversaturated, flecked with 00s R&B, Bollywood, drill rap, slinky flamenco, even a skit on the children’s game “akkad bakkad”, all of it underlined with hallmarks of north Indian classical.
Not everyone is pleased. Sethi trained under two of the greats of classical music, Ustad Saami and Farida Khanum, and his initial career was in that more traditional world; some fans yearn for “the old Ali Sethi”. Though he’s adamant about using south Asian ragas rather than western chord progressions to inform the melodies for his songs, Sethi recounts how even the esteemed Ustad Saami asked him whether his music lately is fusion or, simply, confusion. “But I think in today’s completely monstrous world, what could be a better reflection than confusion?” Sethi laughs.
The work of Pakistani musicians, including Sethi, has been banned and removed from streaming services in India, where fans are forced to access the music via VPN due to escalating tensions between both countries. “If you’re looking at it from the point of view of ideologues, music is the one thing that has kept the populations of India and Pakistan deeply connected to one another,” he says. “Every time the walls go up, the borders get re-erected but some song slips past, and there’s an instant [release of] fellow feeling … this unspoken connection.”
The brief outbreak of conflict between the two nations earlier this year has worsened the cultural divide. The opening track on Sethi’s album was initially a duet with a well-known Bollywood singer, but a film industry body threatened that any Indian artist collaborating with a Pakistani artist would be blacklisted. The song is now censored, cut through with screams and distorted industrial textures. Sethi has also been unable to get a visa to enter India in nearly a decade. “Ever since I started releasing music, my biggest audience has been in India, and it’s the one place I’ve not been able to go,” he says.
He wryly notes that the themes of “forbidden love” he explores in his music are “already in place” thanks to the travel ban. Inspired by Pakistani revolutionary poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Sethi’s lyrics read like love songs, but they’re layered with double-meanings about ethno-nationalism, Islamophobia, war, queerness and exile. On Bridegroom, he subverts a 13th-century qawwali sometimes sung at weddings, his untethered, gliding voice delivering coy lyrics that translate to “don’t ask about my husband”. This follows “pretty rigorously orchestrated fake news” two years ago, falsely claiming Sethi and his partner, the Pakistani painter Salman Toor, had breached local law and married.
He didn’t know how to react, until the answer came in the form of this song. “I realised the appropriate response is to troll them back with what they think of as semi-sacred music, saying, ‘I refuse to give up my traditions.’”
Sethi may laugh in defiance, but his words are tinged with sadness. “These last few years have been a whirlwind, not always in the nicest ways,” he says. “There’s a lot of angst and despair, a lot of ruing the loss of a milieu, the loss of home – but also revelling in new homes, temporary shelters, finding community with other musicians in places like Los Angeles, London and New York.”
He says the success of NYC mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani is revitalising; the way he “squares that distance between all these different communities.” Love Language, then, is Sethi’s attempt at the same: a “diary of displacement” with the accompanying tour set to be “a variety show for the end times”. Mainly, he wants the music to be a refuge, and to capture his and his audience’s multiplicities.
“I’m hoping it comes across as a work of synthesis rather than a work of assimilation,” Sethi says of his album, an attempt to make hybrid music without “simplifying or diluting” any of its constituent parts. “I feel equally rooted in Punjabi bhangra and hyperpop, equally conversant with queer club anthems and Sufi poetry; and, actually, I see all these connections all the time, because they dwell within me.”
• Love Language is out now on Zubberdust Media/The Orchard
