Seems you can’t have a Grammys these days without AROOJ AFTAB, the transportational Pakistani singer melding jazz and Qawwali with spice of her own. But, with her star ascendant and a new trio album due, she’s wary of pressure on her to ‘represent’. “I’m not a pawn,” she assures VICTORIA SEGAL.

IT’S A SIGN OF HOW MUCH AROOJ AFTAB’S LIFE HAS CHANGED IN THE TWO years since her beautiful third album, 2021’s Vulture Prince, was released, that she now has the dubious luxury of a stylist.

“Some days he wants to put me in, like, a giant leather flower or something,” she says. “At this point I’m just like, OK, fine, I’ll wear whatever you want me to. So long as I can move around and sit, we’re good.”

Aftab speaks to MOJO from her Brooklyn apartment, with another opportunity for directional stagewear on the horizon: it’s just days until the 2023 Grammy Awards, where the Pakistani singer and composer has been nominated in the Best Global Music Performance category for her song Udhero Na. She wrote the track as a heartbroken teenager in Lahore and she’s pleased with its glittering second life; if somebody had told her younger self where it would take her, she says, “I would not have believed the time-traveller.”

It’s not her first Grammys, however. Last year, in an experience that oscillated “between excitement and so much anxiety”, she was nominated both for Best New Artist and Best Global Music Performance, triumphing in the latter category with Mohabbat – in English: “Love” – a track Barack Obama placed on his Summer 2021 playlist. She became the first Pakistani woman to win a Grammy.

A synthesis of antique Urdu ghazals – poems of love, longing and loss that tremble between the spiritual and the secular – devotional Sufi song Qawwali and Aftab’s work on New York’s experimental jazz scene, Vulture Prince was a powerful recontextualising of ancient and modern, of new emotion and old scars. Aftab dedicated the record to her brother Maher, who died during its recording, but you don’t need to know that to feel how this music makes space to sit with grief and absence, how Aftab holds pain and yearning close in her voice. It’s an approach that endures on Love In Exile, Aftab’s new trio project with “incredible” composers Vijay Iyer and Shahzad Ismaily.