It’s been nearly 50 years since the founders of Tishoumaren group, Tinariwen, first started making music together, and nearly 25 years since their Radio Tisdas Sessions brought them to a global audience. In that time, they have been key in shaping how audiences around the world conceptualise Tuareg art and society, no easy task for any one band. Tinariwen‘s tenth album, Hoggar, shows them continuing to shape this representational paradigm.
The group’s music is perhaps more poignant than ever, made with a reverence for history and a sense of community that grows stronger over time. As always, their music speaks truth to oppression, and the quiet strength it radiates is clearer than ever.
In part, perhaps this is because their new album is a kind of homecoming, if a bittersweet one. Currently unable to return to Mali, the group recorded Hoggar in Tamanrasset, Algeria, in studios owned by next-generation assouf band Imarhan. It’s the same place where Ibrahim Ag Alhabib, Alhassane Ag Touhami, and Abdallah Ag Alhousseyni–all founders and current members–first met in exile and began making music together back in 1979.
The city today still has a large Tuareg population relative to the rest of Algeria. That presence is audible in the backing vocalists who support the band throughout in warm refrains. Members of bands Imarhan and Terakaft, Tinariwen founder Liya ag Ablil, and past Tinariwen vocalist Wonou Walet Sidati also join, living symbols of the band’s deep roots and ongoing legacy.
As always, the music itself is technically wondrous. Longtime Tinariwen listeners will already feel familiar with the earthy vocals and intricate intertwinings of acoustic and electric guitar lines. Contemporary production touches, especially subtle and spacious reverb, let the hallmarks of their sound resonate. Especially stunning: final track “Aba Malik”, written and sung by Abdallah Ag Alhousseyni. In a weathered but resolute voice, Abdallah decries the mercenary activities perpetrated by the Wagner Group in northern Mali over thundering drumbeats and quivering strings. Extended echoes make the fury even more palpable in its simmering.
A few big-name guests beyond the ensemble’s regular lineup lend additional colours to the palette. Singer-songwriter José González exchanges murmured verses with Ibrahim Ag Alhabib on gentle “Imidiwan Takyadam”. The velvety delivery of Sudanese performer Sulafa Elyas lends “Sagherat Assani” sumptuous melisma. Few collaborations are more organic, though, than Ibrahim and Abdallah coming together to split lead vocal duties on “Asstaghfero Allah”, a rarity in the Tinariwen catalogue. The choice seems to underscore a philosophy at the heart of Tinariwen’s work as a whole, and of Hoggar in particular: that strength comes from working together.
Jutting up from the surface of the Sahara, the Hoggar Mountains are a dramatic feature of the southern Algerian landscape. For millennia, they have sustained life, as evidenced by features such as prehistoric cave paintings, the tomb of the fourth-century Tuareg queen Tin Hinan, and areas of tremendous biodiversity. Today, they bear traces of long-gone rivers, extinct volcanoes, Christian missions, and atomic testing.
These palimpsestic histories, ever in process, make the range a very fitting namesake for Hoggar. Yet another moving installation in the Tinariwen oeuvre, Hoggar grounds its audiences in the group’s realities with deep care. Iconic though the Tinariwen sound is, Hoggar reminds us, it is also as dynamic as the people who shape it, not only the band’s regular members but all those they include in their community. In short, Tinariwen’s tenth album is a gem–of course.