Arooj Aftab is a Pakistani-American professional singer, film score composer, and producer. Based in New York City, she works mainly within the jazz minimalist and neo-Sufi genres.
NPR featured Aftab on their 2018 list of 200 Greatest Songs by 21st Century Women. She also appears on NPR’s 2011 list of 100 Composers Under 40.
To date, Aftab has released three albums. She is especially known for translating and composing ancient Islamic poetry from Urdu into minimalist jazz. Following the release of her latest album, Vulture Prince, the singer-songwriter now also boasts a Grammy nomination. In fact, Aftab is the first Pakistani to be nominated for Best New Artist.
In 2018, Dua Lipa received the same nomination. She has gone on to win 3 Grammys with 8 other nominations.
Arooj Aftab: Singer, composer, and media editor
Aftab works as the Senior Audio Director for the New York City-based digital media company Genius. She first began there as a Video Director in 2016. The singer is also a music composer and sound designer for the Vancouver-based game development studio EggNut.
In 2010, Aftab graduated from Berklee College of Music. During this time, she double majored in Jazz Composition and Music Production and Engineering. After college, Aftab edited video and sound for media companies and organizations including VICE News and The Huffington Post.
“Writing the sound is the fun part! The colors and the textures, the little dynamic variations, things like one instrument completing the other instrument’s phrases,” Aftab told Fifteen Questions. “What you compose can be really good but also really basic if you don’t have great sound ideas.”
The singer released her first album, Bird Under Water, independently in 2015. Aftab later released her second album, Siren Islands, in 2018 with the New York City label New Amsterdam Records.
A freelance music composer, Aftab wrote the score for Indian filmmaker Karishma Dev Dube’s narrative short film Bittu (2019). The film also earned a nomination for Best Live Action Short Film at the 93rd Academy Awards.
The singer-producer earned a credit as Video Editor of Pakistani filmmaker Asad Faruqi’s Armed With Faith (2017). The documentary received the Emmy for Outstanding Politics and Government Documentary in 2019.
Aftab sang on Puerto Rican rapper Residente’s “Antes Que El Mundo Se Acabe.” The single won the 2020 Latin Grammy for Best Rap/Hip Hop song.
Arooj Aftab releases “Vulture Prince”
In April 2021 Aftab released her third album, Vulture Prince, with New Amsterdam Records. The album is dedicated to her younger brother, Maher, who passed away during the album’s production. Former President Barack Obama added the fifth track, “Mohabbat,” to his 38-track summer playlist that year.
“Vulture Prince is about revisiting places I’ve called mine,” Aftab said in a press release, “places that don’t necessarily exist anymore. It’s about people, friendships, relationships—some relationships that were unexpectedly short term, and how to deal with that.”
Arooj Aftab rose to fame in Pakistan
Aftab is Pakistani-American. She was born in Saudi Arabia in 1985 and moved to Lahore, Pakistan as a teenager with her parents and two brothers and speaks English, Punjabi, and Urdu.
Teenage Aftab began recording acoustic guitar covers and posting them online. She went viral in 2007.
“I was recording a bunch of covers and just releasing them,” Aftab told The World. “And all of those went viral. One of them being a cover of Leonard Cohen, Jeff Buckley’s ‘Hallelujah.’ And at the time, because no one was really doing it, I became sort of like a household name overnight.”
“I did the usual things in high school like play U2 and Seven Nation Army covers, but I’d also spend a lot of alone time listening to music like Zakir Hussain, Ella Fitzgerald, Abida Parveen and Leonard Cohen very deeply,” she said.
Aftab began singing and composing as a child.
“The earliest I can remember is when I was maybe 9 or 10, making up my own melodies and singing them around the house or for guests and people asking where they could hear that song or what it was,” Aftab recalled. “Later, as a teen I started composing in a singer/songwriter fashion with my guitar, sometimes in Urdu, sometimes in English…I’ve been surrounded by a lot of music from a very young age.”
At 19, Aftab left Pakistan to pursue her degree at Berklee College of Music in Boston.
Arooj Aftab receives “Best New Artist” Grammy nomination
In November, the 64th Grammy Awards announced Aftab as a nominee for the Best New Artist category. She is the first Pakistani to be nominated for the category, and the first to be nominated overall since 1996.
Aftab’s hit track “Mohabbat” from her third album Vulture Prince earned her the nomination. Originally, “Mohabbat” is a ghazal poem in traditional Arabic verse. Aftab adapted three of the ghazal’s nine couplets into her rendition of the composition.
“The poetry was written in the 1920s by Hafeez Hoshiarpuri, and it’s kind of like a jazz standard,” Aftab told Berklee. “It says the world will continue to love you and you will have an endless amount of lovers, but I won’t be one of them…It’s kind of like a passing on, a moving on, a closure song.”
Arooj Aftab appears alongside artists such as Olivia Rodrigo, FINNEAS, and Jimmie Allen. She also received a nomination for Best Global Performance. The Grammys will be awarded in a Los Angeles ceremony on January 31, 2022.
