IMARHAN - Essam

With their fourth album “Essam”, the Algerian Tuareg quintet from Tamanrasset hits the accelerator on musical cross-pollination, without betraying that identity-driven, cultural core which found its exegesis in the desert blues made noble and universal by bands like Tinariwen. The latter have always been fellow travellers in a musical revolution that broke world music free of its reins, fully absorbing the aforementioned outfits along with the equally renowned Mdou Moctar and Tamikrest into an all-encompassing rock scene.

For “Essam”, Imarhan brought in French electropop producer Emile Papandreou (Uto), the perfect foil for Maxime Kosinetz, the Algerian band's longtime sound engineer, and the result is thoroughly enticing.

Innovation and risk-taking underpin the seductive, sensual “Derhan N'Oulhine”, a track that already appeared in Damon Albarn's socio-cultural project “Africa Express Presents… Bahidorá” under the title “Dorhan Oullhin (What The Heart Desires)”. Here it's presented with the same passion and aching melancholy, but with electronic textures and alt-pop echoes that heighten its psychedelic nuances, shifting the axis from desert blues to urban reality.

Imarhan tear through the veil of cultural iconography built purely to suit European and American critics, expanding their musical imagination with thrilling grooves built from voices, percussion and drone music in full folk-psych ecstasy (the biting critique of consumerism on “Azaman Amoutay”) and clever fusions of the sacred (tradition) and the profane (electronics) that truly leave their mark (the spectral “Tamiditin” and the sparkling “Okcheur”).

The shifts stirring the waters of Imarhan's new record, starting with the drone music hiss that infects opening track “Ahitmanin”, remain rooted in the communal spirit that desert blues and Tuareg culture place at the heart of their artistic expression. Kosinetz and Papandreou's modern strategies reinforce rather than subvert the band's original language. Even the echoes wrapped around Sadam's voice amplify its evocative power, without abandoning its intimate socio-political raison d'être.

Friends and acquaintances of the band took part in the project, some contributing no more than a simple handclap, while Eyadou Ag Leche of Tinariwen gifted the band a lovely ballad with choral, intensely spiritual tones (“Adounia Tochal”), an entreaty to the divine to heed the prayers of a people asking for peace, love and freedom.

With “Essam”, the Algerian Tuareg band decisively raises the stakes. The new album once again eludes the traps of self-indulgence, while these ten tracks brim with positivity and energy. With the closing epic “Assagasswar”, Imarhan push the boundaries even further, reconciling desert blues tradition with gentle yet daring electronic abstractions and dub-soul flourishes — further proof of a masterful innovation that defies world-music rhetoric and celebrates music as a universal language.

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19/01/2026