I’M NEW HERE
Arooj Aftab
Brooklyn-based singer drawing on ambient jazz and Pakistani love ballads to make one of the year’s most stunning albums
Aftab:
making arresting music after “significant life events”
AROOJ AFTAB is laughing when we speak, recovering from being chased around her Brooklyn backyard by a pair of violetcoloured carpenter bees. “They go around in pairs and they terrorise you if you’re smoking a cigarette,” she explains. “They’re humongous!”
The singer has now called New York home for more than 10 years, but the city still has the capacity to surprise her. Born in Saudi Arabia but raised in Pakistan from the age of 11, she was 21 when she left Lahore to study at Berklee College Of Music in Boston. “I had to make a significant sacrifice at a very young age,” she says, listing the relationships she had to leave behind when heading to America. “Not only relationships to human beings but to sense and places and streets and bodies of water. And that was really hard.”