Arooj Aftab Is Anything but Predictable

Arooj Aftab ‘10 was a young teenager in Lahore, Pakistan, when her relationship to music started to evolve. She started imagining changing the songs she was listening to—how she might tweak the bass line or rework the melody. 

"It's like your first impulse to cover a song: I want to hear that in my voice," she told me. "I wanted to change the actual arrangement, which is insane for a 13-year-old to think. Sometimes it just feels like music can be your destiny, because there's no way to explain why I would feel that way. I had no tools or any training to know that's even a thing. But I innately felt that I wanted to." 

In the years since those early musical instincts emerged, a totally singular career has unscrolled. After beginning her music education in Pakistan through Berkleemusic.com (the precursor to Berklee Online), Aftab came to Boston to study on campus at Berklee, where she earned a degree in music production and engineering. From Berklee, she moved to New York City, and over the following decade she staked out her sound in the local scene and on two excellent albums, 2015’s acoustic-driven Bird Under Water and 2018’s ambient electronic Siren Islands. Her 2021 breakout album, Vulture Prince, earned her a Grammy Award in the Best Global Music Performance category for the song “Mohabbat,” which was also listed on President Barack Obama’s annual summer playlist. After Vulture Prince, Aftab signed to Verve Records, the historic Universal Music Group label home to both jazz legends and genre-defying contemporary acts. 

Today she stands as one of contemporary music’s most distinctive yet least definable artists. If you’ve heard any of her projects, you know the sound instantly: that voice like thick smoke weaving slowly upward, joining a shapeshifting cloud of acoustic textures, South Asian folk and classical tones, jazz improvisations, and minimalist electronics. But the resulting compositions are anything but predictable. They can be meditative and oblique, like her 2023 collaboration with Vijay Iyer and Shahzad Ismaily, Love in Exile. They can also stun with their immediacy, like the alluring earworm “Raat Ki Rani,” the lead single from 2024’s Night Reign, remixed by both the jammy psych-rockers Khruangbin and indie-electronic duo Sylvan Esso. Both projects were nominated for Grammys. 

One of the most striking aspects of Aftab’s work is how that combination of so many hyper-specific influences can sound so much like an invitation. When I asked Christiane Karam, one of her former instructors, about this quality in Aftab’s music, she explained, “We're wired to experience anything that's not familiar as a threat, and to shy away from it. This is why successful fusion artists are just miraculous, because what they're doing is they're making the unfamiliar familiar enough that we're willing to lend an ear.” 

Aftab and I spoke during a short beak between tour legs. The conversation ranged widely, from her childhood influences to her path through Berklee, the high stakes of making a living as an artist, the importance of finding the right collaborators, and much more. Her cool confidence suffused every subject, as did a charming tendency to universalize parts of her story—“it’s like your first instinct to cover a song”—turning me into you, and extending deeply personal truths across divisions of identity, experience, style, and culture.  

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.   

You’ve said you want to make music with and for everybody. Your sound is very specific and rooted in traditions that may be new to some listeners, yet it resonates widely. When you’re making music, are you thinking about your audience, or does that broader connection emerge naturally from expressing yourself? 

Aftab: I have been asked a lot, "Who is it for and where is it coming from, and what have you studied and how did you get to this point?" The answer is always a little bit the same: It's a really personal music, and it's for everybody . . . because it's personal, because of my journey in jazz and my love for acoustic guitar, folk music, and R&B, and the blues, and growing up in Pakistan—having those melodies and those traditions, even though I'm not classically trained and I couldn't tell you anything about any sort of South Asian traditional music. It's a combination of all the things that I love. And it's a very unpretentious combination, I hope. I strive for the music to feel natural, to feel like this is the product of somebody's broad interests who happens to be a musician. 

It's all of the things all at once. And like you said, it is also very specific, because it's a rare thing that hasn't exactly been executed before in this way. Which makes it really exciting. I don't make music for audiences. I make the music that I want to hear that I can't find anywhere. I wanted to hear this music for myself, and I couldn't find it anywhere, so I had to make it. 

How did growing up in Pakistan surrounded by music affect you? 

Aftab: I grew up in a house where everybody loved music a lot, in particular, but also beauty and art, and my mom's also super into nutrition and food. They were very intentional about the things that they would do, and they would live their life in this way that prioritized listening to music and watching good TV. It wasn't about it being a luxury; it was about it being what we need. 

I think that happens to come from them being from a city like Lahore, which is such a romantic place, especially when they were growing up there. That’s just part of the culture from their time. And they put that into us. Me and my siblings just thought it was extremely normal to be so tuned in.

"Berklee unlocked the language that I needed to communicate with myself, my own ideas, and the world of music inside of my head."

Arooj Aftab ’10

Can you talk about your journey from Berklee Online to Berklee's campus in Boston? 

Aftab: I finished high school, and then really wanted to study music . . . [but] there was a bit of confusion around: What is an education in music? What does it mean? What does a contemporary education look like? I was really into production and engineering as well. I had not studied music theory. I didn't even have piano lessons. And then I saw the Berklee curriculum and I was like, well this is definitely the place. They have all the things that I want to learn. 

But . . . I couldn't pay the tuition. It's miraculous when I think about it. I said, "Let me apply to this." And simultaneously, [Berklee Online] had just put out this small scholarship program. I applied to it and I got that. Then I was able to take five courses—that gave me a year to study music theory and Keyboard 101 and just gain a little bit of a base, and to understand what this even is—organized music education, and a bachelor's degree, and this opportunity to meet musicians from all over the world, and to study jazz [and] the history of music. To pursue music in a place that has the infrastructure for it. 

It sounds like the irrational confidence has served you well.

Aftab: The stakes are so high, you can't afford to be mediocre at the thing that you want to do. You have to do something really incredible. You have to be very serious. 

What are the lessons from Berklee that still stick with you?

Aftab: Berklee unlocked the language that I needed to communicate with myself, my own ideas, and the world of music inside of my head. It allowed me to put my hands on physical things and put my voice in the right places to really get it out of my body. 

And just incredible moments, also. That's where I met Jamey Haddad [’73]. That's where I met esperanza spalding [BM ’05 ’18H]. That's where I ran into Meshell Ndegeocello in a hallway. Our [opening] concert was Lalah Hathaway [’90 ’22H]. That's where I shook Zakir Hussain's [’19H] hand, because I knew the back door of the BPC. There's so many of these moments that happened at Berklee that unlocked this musicianship and this excitement for music. All these moments and all these people that I met—these were also teaching/mentorship moments, to be like, "Oh my God, I can do this." This is a thing, this is a lifestyle, this is a community.

How did you know you wanted to produce as well as perform? 

Aftab: I wanted to have the power, and the control, and the knowledge, because the worst thing ever is to just be the female singer in the room, and it's just, like, dude-broing all over the place, and you don't really know how to articulate what you want. That for me is the biggest heart-sinking anxiety moment. And it would happen a lot, because the patriarchy is alive and well, especially in music, even today. 

And I am a nerd. I like to plug things in, and I like to fiddle with knobs, and I like to play video games. . . . So that interest was already there. At some point I was just like, "Can you please get out of my way so that I can just set this up the way I want to and be able to hear the things the way I want to hear them?" 

You also worked on an Emmy-winning documentary. How did you get into film editing work, and what did you learn from that part of your career?

Aftab: If you know audio software, switching to a video software is very easy, 'cause it's all kind of the same thing. . . . So if you, on top of that, have a good sense of rhythm, because you come from a music background, then you can become a really great video editor. . . . That's what happened to me. When I moved to New York, all the recording studios were closing. . . . All the video content was moving online, so there was so much work in these post-production houses to edit these videos, edit documentary films. 

And then also, because of the recession, they were like, "Wait, she can also clean up the audio. She can also score the film. She can also edit the video. This person is three people in one." 

So I was getting those gigs and was getting pretty good. That was my day job all the way up until the pandemic. . . . That is because of the fact that I have a degree in MP&E, most likely. The skills came in handy. And yeah, I worked on this documentary and it won an Emmy, and so they also sent me a plaque. 

"I make the music that I want to hear that I can't find anywhere."

Arooj Aftab ’10

You've worked with so many incredible artists over the years. How do you go about choosing the right people for a project? 

Aftab: I think there's a level of trust and love that needs to be expressed as part of the project. The level of playing [also] has to be at a certain place. I view my collaborators not as the instrument player. . . . I view them kind of like these musicians who have transcended their instrument and have a really strong personality of their own in the instrument. So, that's just not a harp player—that's Maeve Gilchrist [BM ’07]. Or that's Joel Ross. You can hear somebody who has really worked on their craft and has transcended the instrument and made it an extension of themselves.  

Grief and joy sit right next to each other in your music. Vulture Prince felt like a meditation on loss [Aftab lost her brother in 2018], and Love in Exile spends a lot of time in this doomy, ambient space. But with Night Reign, it’s not that you’ve left those textures behind—it’s more like you’re asking what else they can hold. There’s a playfulness, a mystery, and even a kind of joy. How you think about that relationship between darkness and light in your work—between grief and joy?

Aftab: They definitely go hand in hand. It's been a personal journey of mine to experience the loss of that magnitude—where you're like, "Oh my God, something like that could never happen to me," and then it happens, and you're like, "This is the worst thing that's ever happened to me in my life. What am I supposed to do now?" You start to molecularly rearrange yourself. So many things are tied to who you are, and one of the most important things that's tied to who you are in the moment is music, as a musician. So for me, I had really no way out. I had to channel it into music or lose music to it. 

This sound that I was creating was also simultaneously happening, and I had spent so much time trying to put it together with the right musicians, teaching and training them to play this new sound. And then grief and loss started to channel into it as well. 

Then, [with] Night Reign, I started to feel . . . that I want to absorb this loss as a real thing, as a life event, and I also want to celebrate this person's life, and my story is going to keep going. I want to be happy again, and I want to be joyous again. I think that that is the natural way that things are supposed to go. Celebrate the life that already was there and then continue to bring joy into your own, and . . . keep the music really close to how your heart is feeling. Let it be natural. I really like what you said: It's not like we departed from the textures that I created in Vulture Prince. It's just that I evolved them. 

Over the past few years, so many new audiences have gotten excited about what you're doing. What has that experience felt like for you? 

Aftab: It's like: Finally, guys! I've been trying to show you this thing, and I've been saying like, "Come on, look. It's really cool." Finally it feels like everybody's down, and they get it. And I'm having to explain it less and less. 

I had gotten to a point in my career before Vulture Prince where I was like, I'm just gonna be making this really intricate, beautiful music and no one's gonna care. Then I was proven very wrong, and it restored my faith in listenership. We're told over and over again by capitalist music industry: They're not gonna wanna listen. The songs have to be three minutes long. We're talking about listeners as if they're absolute idiots. And that's always felt a little strange to me. I think we can grow an audience that likes different things.

You don't have to appeal to a lowest common denominator in order for people to get into your music. 

Aftab: Yeah. Or that they would be intimidated by it, or that they would feel alienated if it's in a language they don't understand. None of that has been true. My audience keeps growing, and everybody keeps loving it. It's being seen as just a really great contemporary style of music that is familiar, but also new and refreshing. 

That's exactly what I've wanted. And it's people from all ranges. It's really young people. It's the old jazz heads. It's Brown people. Black people. White people. Everybody is digging it and coming together in these rooms. And that's also so awesome to see. Sometimes people are very formal and they're sitting really quietly. Sometimes we're all screaming and jumping and shouting. There's so many forms that the music ends up taking.

Your musical tastes seem completely omnivorous. Where are you finding inspiration these days, and do you have a sense of what's next for you musically? 

Aftab: I keep going in between, like, really hard-hitting contemporary flamenco stuff—not for what I want to do, but what makes me feel excited. The algorithm is just feeding it to me, and I don't mind at all, because I had no idea that there was this whole subgenre. But Rosalía's probably the reason why all of that's happening now. And then I also feel like returning to my teenage self, where I'm again loving really soft acoustic guitar songs. I don't think either of those are a good idea for my next album, but we'll see. 

One of my processes when I'm writing is to try to not listen to too much music, so that my unicorn horn can grow all the way out, and then it can tell me what we're doing. 

This article originally appeared in the spring 2026 issue of Berklee Today under the title "Night Vision."