The Sudan-born, Minneapolis-raised musician has spent the last few years working with Travis Scott, co-starring on a Netflix show, and making an ambitious concept album

Natural catastrophes keep following Dua Saleh. When the singer-songwriter moved to Glendale, California, a few years ago, they found themselves ill-prepared for Los Angeles’ annual wildfires. When they decamped to Wales to film the Netflix show Sex Education, they were taken aback by the flooding in Cardiff. 

All of these experiences got Saleh, 31, thinking deeply about dystopia and destruction. They wrote a song called “Flood.” They began thinking more about the planet, its ecosystems, and its long-term sustainability. “I was like, ‘Damn, we’re not paying enough attention to how our home is being affected,’” they say. “We’re apathetic: There’s so much nihilism in our society because we’re just traumamaxxing, but we’re also watching politicians jestermaxxing. We can’t take it seriously, because how do we do that when everything is so abysmal? Drones are bombing countries because of AI. We’re being surveilled by AI. Water sources are being depleted because of AI. I’m watching the world crash out as it’s depleted of its sources of life.”

As an actor, writer, and singer, Saleh is accustomed to processing calamity through art. The Sudan-born, Minneapolis-raised, L.A.-residing singer-artist has found an increased profile in recent years due to their work on Sex Education as well as a high-profile credit on Travis Scott’s 2023 album Utopia. They’ve collaborated with artists like Serpentwithfeet and count luminaries like Moses Sumney as a fan. They’re poised for a breakout with their forthcoming second album, Of Earth & Wires, which features cameos from poet-musician Aja Monet, fellow Sudanese singer Gaidaa, and Bon Iver, whose vocals adorn three tracks, including the standout “Flood.” 

The album, which blends indie pop, noise rock, spoken-word poetry, gentle folk, and R&B, follows the same conceptual journey between two fictional lovers that Saleh introduced on their 2024 debut, I Should Call Them. “Those two lovers were just toxic young lovers — regular gay people — who don’t know much about love, but know they’re soulmates, and they survived the apocalypse that occurred in the first album’s world,” Saleh says. “In the second album, they’ve survived, but they’ve lost their loved ones. They’ve survived chaos and calamity and now they’re living in destitute ruin trying to make sense of themselves. They’re trying to see what it’s like to be a human being, but because AI technology took over their world, they lost their sense of self.”

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Dua Saleh is prone to answering straightforward questions (like “What inspired this song?”) with big-picture ideas and thoughts — about AI-induced capitalist dystopia, or the climate catastrophe, or an analysis of Lord of the Flies through the lens of gender studies (their college major).

Speaking with Rolling Stone this Spring, Saleh is nervous and frequently self-deprecating (“I used to be toxic,” they say at one point, before erupting into laughter). After they use the phrase “holy smokes” for the second time, they pause. “Sorry,” they say, “I talk like a 1950s white boy.” 

Asked how their latest record came to be, Saleh, wearing a Sudan soccer jersey, pauses and looks off-camera. “I see Baby Yoda staring at me,” they say, before grabbing a Grogu plushie they proceed to hold for much of the remainder of the interview, “so maybe I should start with the sci-fi concept.”

But as much as Saleh is inclined towards deep thinking, their latest record is, ultimately, a heartfelt reflection and meditation on grief, love, and roots.

“I’m just talking about home, what home means to me,” they say. “Because I’m worried about our home: Earth. I’m not worried about the Earth imploding in on itself or anything crazy. I’m worried about humanity not being able to sustain itself on Earth.”

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AFTER BEING BORN in Sudan, Saleh landed up in the Twin Cities after a brief initial detour in Fargo (“little too conservative,” they say of the North Dakota city). They took to writing at a young age, writing poems in class in middle school that were so dark — or, as Saleh puts it, “too fire” — that it got them reprimanded. Saleh doesn’t get into detail about what they were struggling with at that time in their life, but points to the chorus from their new finger-picked ballad “Anemic”: “Missed my dad,” they sing on the song, “Found out he’s an asshole/How ‘bout that.”

As a teenager growing up in St. Paul, Saleh soaked in the city’s rich history of R&B, jazz, and hip-hop, and soon found themselves on the outskirts of the area’s flourishing slam poetry scene. They started attending open mics as an observer before being encouraged to read their own work. Spoken-word poetry eventually led to music, which felt like a relief after the intensity of reciting their own poetry out loud.

“I wouldn’t have been able to sing without the poetry,” Saleh says, “because I was so depressed from reliving my trauma through the poetry that I had to soothe myself with singing melodies and writing songs.”

Part of Dua Saleh’s appeal as a songwriter is the way they combine big-picture concepts and politics with eminently catchy record-making. That’s never been more the case than on Of Earth & Wires, their most immediately accessible and pop-oriented record to date. The chorus of “I Do, I Do” might be the most irresistible piece of dreamy Eighties synth-pop on an indie record this year.

On “Cállate,” a song Saleh is admittedly a bit nervous to talk about (“it was the most recent thing that happened,” is all they say), they play with their vocal register — switching from falsetto to mid-range croon to rapping — as a form of furthering the story they’re telling in the song. “You can hear the two worlds where there’s tension between the lovers,” they say. “Sometimes I’ll have the divine feminine and divine masculine speaking to each other [in a song] and those are the two characters, the two queer lovers we’re following along these pathlines. They’re speaking through me. I’m using my lived experience and my actual life, but channeling that into the world [these characters] live in.”

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The story Saleh is telling on Of Earth & Wires is rooted both in Afrofuturism and in a diasporic loss that’s long been an undercurrent in their writing. The story of the album’s two characters — two lovers “trying to remember everything they knew about themselves and their love prior to the world coming to ruin,” as they put it — carries echoes of Saleh’s own story as someone who grew up many thousands of miles from their birthplace.

“I’m just using the cultural context of my Sudanese identity,” Saleh says of their storytelling and worldbuilding on the album. “I don’t know my indigenous language! I’m trying to make sense of that. Imperialism and war and all these drones and bombings and stuff like that, it’s impacted me. I literally have no access to my language. I don’t know if there were queer gods. I don’t know anything about my own culture outside of what imperialism has left us with.”