With the help of Bon Iver and despite criticism of technology, the pop musician is heading for the big stages.
There has to be a lot of enthusiasm in the room to not just put one feature together and put it on your album, but three. At least that’s how it seems to have been with Justin Vernon aka Bon Iver and Dua Saleh. Of Earth & Wires are three songs together. Dua who? Saleh was born in Sudan, grew up in Minneapolis and now makes his home in Los Angeles. From around 2017, poetry at open mic nights turned into music more and more seriously.
And it’s a mix of different worlds: the Sudanese music that Saleh grew up with, classic jazz, Golden Era hip-hop from the 1990s, queer club music and pop R’n’B. And all of these influences can be heard more and less on the second album after the conceptual work I Should Call Them (2024), especially their love for big pop gestures (such as in “I Do, I Do”).
Thematically, as the album title suggests, Dua Saleh deals with the dark sides of technological progress, with questions of identity, with trauma (“Firestorm” about the LA fires with Bon Iver and the Trans Chorus of Los Angeles) and Trost (“All Is Love”). If there’s one criticism of Of Earth & Wires, it’s that it can almost seem a little too polished. In a just world, the really big stages should all belong to Dua Saleh.
