Tears Of Injustice (Vinyl)

Mdou Moctar’s new album is Funeral for Justice completely re-recorded and rearranged for acoustic and traditional instruments. It is an evolution of the band’s critically-adored breakout – the meditative mirror-image to the blistering original.

In July of 2023, Mdou Moctar was on tour in the United States when the president of Niger, Mohamed Bazoum, was deposed by a military junta who made him prisoner at the presidential residence. They ordered the nation’s borders closed, leaving band members Mdou Moctar, Ahmoudou Madassane, and Souleymane Ibrahim unable to return home to their families. Plans to record a companion to Funeral for Justice – then still many months from release – had been in the works already, but the idea now took on new urgency and gravity. Two days after the tour wrapped in New York City, the quartet began tracking Tears of Injustice at Brooklyn’s Bunker Studio with engineer Seth Manchester.

On Funeral for Justice, anger at the plight of Niger and the Tuareg people is plainly expressed in the music’s volume and velocity.

On Tears, the songs retain that weight sans amplification. They are steeped in sadness, conveying the grief of a nation locked into a constant churn of poverty, colonial exploitation, and political upheaval. It is Tuareg protest music in raw and essential form.