Since the band’s creation in 2018, the French-Moroccan power quartet Bab L’ Bluz have evolved their sound. Their front woman, Yousra Mansour, revealed how this has been shaped by their live audiences: “We adapted our sound for festival crowds, made it heavier, rockier. We added more instruments. More courage. More fire.”
That fire and courage are more than evident on their new single ‘Imazighen’, taken from their second album ‘Swaken’, out on 10 May 2024 on Real World Records.
Swaken (origin: Moroccan Darija) – possessions, haunting, transcendence. Spirits inhabiting humans.
The song celebrates the indigenous people of North Africa and the revival of Amazigh culture in Morocco. As explained in the accompanying press, some tensions persist between Amazigh-speaking and Arabic-speaking individuals, even though they share the same blood and many other commonalities. The song promotes the idea that ethnic diversity in Morocco, and the world in general, is a richness to be celebrated, thus opposing racism and fascism.
Monsour co-founded the band with French guitarist, bass guembri lute player and multi-instrumentalist Brice Bottin, who co-produced Swaken in the Wood Room at Real World Studios with the latter’s Katie May.
For the most part, Mansour writes and sings in Darija, her Moroccan-Arabic dialect and the preferred language of the Nayda movement (‘nayda’ means ‘up’ in Darija). On ‘Swaken’, she confronts such contentious topics as Moroccan inheritance laws, gender wage disparities and rising cases of suicide and depression while calling for unity, tolerance and kindness in an increasingly fragile world.
“There are still times when we are confronted with outdated attitudes,” says Mansour with a shrug. “Which only makes me more determined to express everything I feel. I will not censor myself.”
Pre-order on Bandcamp: https://bablbluz.bandcamp.com/album/swaken
Stream/Digital: https://lnk.to/RW259