Mdou Moctar recently announced their new album ‘Tears of Injustice‘. The album will be released on February 28, 2025 via Matador/Beggars. Mdou Moctar will play in Paradiso, Amsterdam on December 15.
If ‘Funeral for Justice‘ was the sound of outrage, then ‘Tears of Injustice‘ is the sound of grief. Mdou Moctar’s new album ‘Funeral for Justice’ is completely re-recorded and arranged for acoustic and traditional instruments.
In July 2023, Mdou Moctar was on tour in the United States when Niger’s President Mohamed Bazoum was deposed by a military junta, which detained him in the presidential residence. They ordered the country’s borders closed, preventing band members Mdou Moctar, Ahmoudou Madassane and Souleymane Ibrahim from returning home to their families. Plans to record a sequel to ‘Funeral for Justice’ – at the time still months away from release – were already in the works, but the idea now took on a new urgency and seriousness. Two days after the tour ended in New York City, the foursome began recording “Tears of Injustice” at Bunker Studio in Brooklyn, with sound engineer Seth Manchester.
“We wanted to make a separate version of Funeral for people to hear,” the band’s US-based bassist and producer, Mikey Coltun explains. “We’re always playing around with arrangements at shows. We wanted to prove that we could do it on a record, too. And there’s a whole other side of the band that comes out when we play a stripped down set. It becomes something new.”
They chose to record “Tears of Injustice” while sitting together in one room, keeping the session loose, stripped-down and spontaneous. “We didn’t really work on the arrangements prior to going in,” Coltun remembers. “We’d just play, find the feel, and do the song.” Everything came together quickly, with the main filming completed in just two days. The hypnotic eight-minute version of ‘Imouhar’ is actually two different takes of the song, played in quick succession – Moctar didn’t stop long enough to separate the takes. After a month the band was able to return to Niger and when that happened, Coltun gave Madassane a Zoom recorder. The rhythm guitarist used this to record a group of Tuaregs performing call-and-response style vocals, which was later added into the final mix.
On ‘Funeral for Justice’ the anger about the fate of Niger and the Tuareg people is clearly expressed in the volume and speed of the music. On ‘Tears of Injustice’ the songs retain that weight, but without amplification. Steeped in sadness, they capture the suffering of a nation stuck in a constant cycle of poverty, colonial exploitation and political unrest. It is Tuareg protest music in raw and essential form. “When Mdou writes the lyrics, he typically writes them with an acoustic guitar. So you’re getting closer to that original moment,” says Coltun. “It retains heaviness, but it’s haunting.”
Tracklist “Tears of Injustice”
1. Funeral for Justice (Injustice Version)
2. Imouhar (Injustice Version)
3. Takoba (Injustice Version)
4. Sousoume Tamacheq (Injustice Version)
5. Imajighen (Injustice Version)
6. Tchinta (Injustice Version)
7. Oh France (Injustice Version)
8. Modern Slaves (Injustice Version)
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