Mustafa by Jack McKain
SHARES LIVE SESSION PERFORMING SONGS FROM DUNYA FEATURING DANIEL CAESAR AND MORE
DUNYA OUT NOW VIA JAGJAGUWAR
Lost in The Dunya World Tour
TICKETS: mustafathepoet.com/tour
After playing select dates in major markets in support of his 2021 project When Smoke Rises, singer-songwriter Mustafa announces his debut world tour to launch in February of 2025. The announcement comes in conjunction with his debut album Dunya being celebrated as one of the best albums of 2024 by Rolling Stone, The New York Times, Vulture NPR, and NME among others. Tickets go on sale this Friday, December 13th at 10AM local time at http://mustafathepoet.com/tour.
Alongside the tour announcement, Mustafa also shares a live session featuring performances of songs from Dunya with album collaborators like Daniel Ceasar, Micah Preite (guitar) Kibrom Birhane (masenqo, krar) and Monica Martin (backing vocals). The session showcases performances of “What good is a heart?,” “Leaving Toronto” and “I’ll Go Anywhere.”
Upon Dunya’s release in late September, the album received critical acclaim by the likes of Pitchfork, Rolling Stone, Teen Vogue, The Face and Kinfolk, the latter two of which feature Mustafa on the covers of their current issues. Though the upcoming live dates serve as his first official headline tour, Mustafa is no stranger to pulling music lovers into his orbit for transformational poetic reflections on faith, personal and familial relationships, and the stark realities of growing up in Toronto’s inner city.
In 2024 alone, he produced two installments of his Artists For Aid concert series, which have taken place in New Jersey and London this year and feature the likes of 070 Shake, Blood Orange, Clairo, Daniel Caesar, Earl Sweatshirt, Faye Webster, FKA twigs, King Krule, Nicolas Jaar, Nick Hakim, Omar Apollo, Ramy Youssef, Stormzy, 6lack, Yasiin Bey and more across the two events, in addition to Mustafa himself.
Speaking about Dunya, Mustafa shares that he is “trying to preserve and celebrate the ordinary life in the hood,” a notion that is beautifully exemplified in a song like “SNL.” But Dunya, which roughly translates from Arabic to “the world in all its flaws” is also an interrogation of his faith and lifelong relationship with Islam, something that Mustafa has referred to as “the longest, most peculiar relationship in my life.” This examination is evident in “I’ll Go Anywhere,” which on surface examination reads as a folk song, albeit one that interpolates a melody his parents sang to him as a child and prominently features the oud, a string instrument originating from the Middle East that folds seamlessly into the record’s unique, rich atmosphere paired with vocal contributions from Rosalía. This effortless mixture of disparate elements that seemingly shouldn’t work together, but ultimately do, speaks to the power of Mustafa’s work as an artist.
Upcoming Tour Dates
2/11 – San Francisco, CA @ Palace of Fine Arts
2/13 – Los Angeles, CA @ Palace Theatre
2/15 – Minneapolis, MN @ Cedar Cultural Center
2/16 – Chicago, IL @ Old Town School of Folk
2/18 – Ann Arbor, MI @ The Ark
2/20 – Brooklyn, NY @ Crown Hill Theater
2/23 – Philadelphia, PA @ First Unitarian Church
2/24 – Washington, D.C. @ Lincoln Theater
2/26 – Somerville, MA @ Arts at the Armory
2/27 – Montreal, QC @ Le National
5/9 – London, ENG @ Barbican
5/10 – Paris, FR @ Cirque d’Hiver
5/11 – Amsterdam, NL @ Paradiso
5/12 – Brussels, BE @ Church Notre Dame de Laeken
5/14 – Berlin, GER @ Hiemathafen
5/16 – Copenhagen, DK @ DR Studie 2
5/18 – Stockholm, SE @ Sodra Teatern
5/23 – Addis Ababa, Ethiopia @ Ashenafi Kebede Performing Arts Center
5/25 – Port Sudan, Sudan @ TBD
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