Folk & WorldBlues
Wedge Records · 13 March 2026
The news on this record is a detail you can’t see on the sleeve: Ibrahim Ag Alhabib and Abdallah Ag Alhousseyni sing together in harmony here for the first time in thirty years. They’re the band’s two founding voices, and putting them back in front of the same microphone gives “Hoggar” a thickness the Tuareg records of the past decade had been losing. The album came out on 13 March on Wedge, Patrick Votan produced it, and it’s the band’s tenth.
“Sagherat Assani”, three thirty-eight, was the first track released ahead of the album, and it isn’t theirs: it’s a traditional Sudanese song sung by Solafa Elyas, a singer and oud player living in exile in France, with a melisma that has nothing to do with the way the Sahara phrases a line. It works because the band doesn’t settle for being the backdrop and plays the piece as though it came from home. The other collaboration, “Imidiwan Takyadam”, four sixteen, brings in José González (Swedish, from an Argentine family) and a chorus of women’s voices over a lyric that holds men to account for the sisters left behind.
The album closes with “Aba Malik”, four zero five, a literal curse against the Wagner Group, the mercenaries operating in Mali: “curse you, Wagner, curse your mother”. There’s enough reverb on the guitar to leave the line hanging in the air. Two tracks earlier, “Khay Erilan”, four fifty, celebrates the Toyota Land Cruiser and a night spent in Sebha. Imprecation and car song have always sat side by side in the Tuareg repertoire, and they do here too.
What’s missing is air. Ten of the eleven tracks sit between three twelve and four fifty, and only “Tad Adounya” passes six minutes (six twenty-six): the forty-five minutes are built out of closed forms, with an entrance, a body and an exit, and the band never allows itself the long open stretch that is exactly what makes it great live. And of everything here, the melody that stays with you is the one they didn’t write. The traditional Sudanese song is also the one the label chose to open the campaign with.
Rating: 7.5/10
Text by Alba Puiggròs