Arooj Aftab played Brighton Festival this week as an invited performer by festival guest director Anoushka Shankar. The show, in the first week of the festival, forms part of her two-month Night Reign Tour album tour. This award-winning Pakistani-American is a multi-hyphenate singer, composer, and producer. She has worked in various musical styles and idioms and was nominated for a Grammy in 2022 as Best New Artist.
The show opened with Berlin-based gender-fluid artist Wooly Aziz, whose electronic-inflected set featured synth-backed spoken word and minimalist vocal lines. While their sound didn’t entirely land with this reviewer, there was a stylish self-assurance to her performance. Donning dark shades and a sharply curated stage presence, Aziz’s aesthetic — and her keyboardist’s industrial textures — reflected the detached coolness of Berlin’s experimental scene. Her presence offered a bold, contemporary contrast to the more meditative tone of the headline act.
Aftab is not an artist you can easily pin down. Her music has been described as a blend of jazz fusion, Hindustani classical, electronica, minimalism, Sufi poetry, and folk — a list that reads like a manifesto of defiance against genre. Performing to a packed and spellbound house, she brought her new album Night Reign to Brighton, fresh from a string of sold-out shows across the US and Europe.
The album has already earned two Grammy nominations and landed on numerous ‘Best of 2024’ lists, including praise from The Guardian newspaper, who declared her music “creating a heart-rending sense of wistful romance”. On stage, that beauty was transformed into something immersive — mysterious, ethereal, and deeply human. She really touched me with her music.
Aftab opened with a nod to her roots: gentle Urdu vocals floating atop ambient textures and slow-building melodies. Her voice, haunting and rich with longing, wrapped itself around the audience like a warm, slow fog. She sang in both English and Urdu (a language famed for its elegance and poetry), leaning into the emotional core of each lyric with sincerity and poise.
Accompanied by a small but extraordinary band, the sound was stripped back but full of depth. Guitarist Perry Smith created spacious, jazz-inflected textures, while a musician friend from Aftab’s college days — seated centre stage with a large accordion — added unexpected warmth and melancholy to the arrangements. Together, they produced something that felt ancient and future-facing all at once.
Between songs, Aftab was quietly charismatic. Her dry humour and understated charm connected easily with the audience. “I’m here to serenade you,” she quipped, as free whisky was passed among the front rows — a surreal but welcome touch. This wit and wordplay continued throughout the spaces between the music, yet whilst performing Aftab’s stage presence is commanding in the most subtle of ways: no fireworks, no theatrics, just the quiet confidence of an artist completely in control of her sound.
The highlight of the set was Mohabbat, the Grammy-winning standout from her earlier album Vulture Prince. The room held its breath as she sang it. This song won Best Global Music Performance award at the 64th Annual Grammy Awards in 2022. where she became the first-ever Pakistani artist to win a Grammy. The track’s minimal accompaniment, delicate phrasing, and a deep emotional intelligence was combined to devastating effect. It felt like a prayer for something unnamed — not mournful, but filled with reverence.
Other highlights from Night Reign included the meditative Na Ja Balam, and the more playful Last Night Reign, where electronic loops met classical phrasing in a conversation across centuries. Each track unfolded slowly, resisting the demands of attention-deficit listening. Aftab invites her audience to slow down, to sink in, to listen with more than just their ears.
What made the evening feel so significant was the context. Here was a South Asian woman headlining a major UK festival slot, with an audience hanging on her every note. There was something quietly revolutionary in the way Aftab held space — as a global citizen, as a genre-defying musician, and as someone telling stories of love, loss, and the self in languages that don’t often dominate Western concert halls.
It’s no surprise that Anoushka Shankar invited her to perform here. The two artists share a sensibility: a trust in the power of tradition, and a refusal to be confined by it. Aftab’s music doesn’t strive to be “world music” in any palatable sense — instead, it just is music: borderless, nuanced, and deeply soulful.
Arooj Aftab is currently on a two-month international tour, and Brighton was lucky to catch her at this point in her journey. She left the stage to a standing ovation, and there was a sense in the air that everyone had just witnessed something quietly extraordinary.
Brighton Festival prides itself on platforming bold and eclectic voices, and in Aftab, they’ve presented one of the most exciting and uncompromising artists on the global stage today. Hers is not music that shouts — it sings softly, and echoes long after the last note has faded.
Very good, fair review. The Dome was the perfect venue for it too, warm and acoustically spacious.