#artscritic

There is a moment in Arooj Aftab's Vulture Prince where time seems to unhinge itself. The strings enter — unhurried, almost reluctant — and her voice follows like something remembered rather than performed. I've been sitting with this record again this week, and I am no closer to explaining what it does to me. That feels right.

Aftab is a Pakistani-American composer and vocalist working in a space that resists easy labeling. Her music draws from Hindustani classical tradition, Sufi devotional song, and contemporary minimalism, yet it never announces these influences the way a genre exercise would. They arrive as texture, as atmosphere. She seems less interested in showcasing her sources than in dissolving them into something genuinely new.

Vulture Prince was dedicated to her late brother, and that grief is present throughout — not as sentiment, but as weight. There is a specific quality of loss that doesn't dramatize itself, that simply is, and Aftab captures it with disarming precision. The album's centerpiece, "Mohabbat," builds so slowly you almost miss when it has become overwhelming.

There is a moment, somewhere between the third and fourth track, when a record stops being background music and becomes the room itself. I found that moment again last night with Arooj Aftab's Vulture Prince — a record I have returned to more times than I can count, and one that continues to give.

Aftab's voice enters without ceremony. No dramatic build, no introductory flourish. Just sound, unhurried and certain, as if the music had always been present and we are simply now paying attention. She works in a tradition — South Asian classical, Sufi devotional music — but she does not wear that tradition as costume. It breathes through her arrangements the way ancestry breathes through a face: recognizable, defining, and entirely her own.

What strikes me most, returning to this album on a warm August evening, is how grief and beauty are made inseparable here. Vulture Prince was dedicated to her late brother, and that loss is present on every track — not as spectacle, but as weight. The harp lines, played with extraordinary restraint, carry something they cannot name. The silences between notes feel earned rather than empty.