Digital Cover: Dua Saleh on Finding Power Through Music

Ever feel like we’re at the end of the world? For the Sudanese-American artist Dua Saleh, the apocalypse has been a lived experience. As real as a white balloon flying into the vision in the very first minutes of our conversation. We determine it a good sign. Right now, we’d accept any luck we can get. Similarly, in their debut album, I SHOULD CALL THEM, Dua holds onto love, with a story of a star-crossed couple at the brink of humanity and environmental demise. “When they find each other, it’s literally at the apex of human existence, as the world is falling apart in whatever reality people think,” they say.

Alongside their breakout role in Sex Education, the R&B extraordinaire has reinvented the genre since their 2019 EP Nūr. Music was always the so-needed healing balm for their soul and a remedy for their mental health. “It warmed me up inside and allowed me to release and not think about how it may come off to another person,” Dua says.

In the new record, they build a sanctuary to reconcile before moving forward. “I was love-struck. I was thinking about my past relationships and situationships, which I never really processed,” Dua says.  From the playful pursuit of a crush in ‘chi girl’ to meeting a beautiful stranger in ‘bo peep’ to the lyrically steaming (“Your bitch she always be crowding me / Says I’m her new sexuality”) ‘coast’, they’re knee-deep in the feelings. “I want people to laugh, and it’s a little horny,” they admit.

In the silly wrapping of the titular nod to a meme, Dua sells priceless insights: “It all ties together, and it’s all about this circle of love that we feel, and desire for love and desire to cherish ourselves, other people, and the earth all at once.” Dua’s dream is for R&B’s antidote to our multi-dimensional angst spreading worldwide. “It brings me back to childhood, growing up in the Midwest and being in a historically Black American, African American neighbourhood. It just feels warm. It feels nice, and it’s really calming for the nerves.” Their version of the genre also offers a cathartic emancipation, especially in ‘2excited’, mixing laid-backness, Black metal and: “the sound of me yelling and screeching during our session figuring out how to communicate exactly what I was thinking”.

Dua Saleh compares the lover’s tale to the planet’s state and our current affairs, recognising that being a human transcends material-only responsibilities to Earth and each other. They’re aware that selling art on a decaying Earth is a capitalistic endeavour. Still, Dua sees beyond the surface level of survival: “We see art, and art has no means of beginning or end because life, in and of itself, is like a romantic gesture of creation. Creation is art in a way.”

In the face of the erasure of Sudanese cultural heritage, Dua pays tribute to their homeland’s unifying force that breathes through poetry and grandiose orchestral-like ensembles. “We have a profound love for that communion spirit when it comes to engaging with folks around us, with the tribe, with the neighbourhood, the village that we’re in,” they say. They pride those communal treasures of resilience as, at the time of our chat, Sudan bleeds.

“An uncle of mine has passed because he was murdered by the military. I know people who have fled. My grandmother wasn’t able to survive the medical procedures that she needed because she wasn’t able to leave Sudan.” The ongoing genocide has directly impacted Dua’s family.

For them, the music is the soul’s mirror and a bottomless well to drown and transmute the sorrows of the marginalised. “We are the earth as well. It was my spirit seeking out a reflection of the reality that I am witnessing as a Sudanese person. So when these two lovers find themselves in this apocalyptic landscape, it’s a direct cause of me thinking about my home country and how it needs eyes on it at all times right now, as well as other Asian states.”

Dua sees the entangled pain of the planet and its carers. They projected it on the album’s cover featuring a naturalistic cyborg-like character, almost Earth personified. “She’s a holy body that we are all blessed to have the opportunity to engage with and to love, and we haven’t shown as much love to her,” they share. “I’m using ‘her’ just because of my connection to sapphism, which is people who appreciate women and people who are not men, just as lovers.” 

They see Earth not necessarily as a maternal figure but as the world that we are and exist in, as they explain: “World that we not only love but that we would not know love without.” For many queer people, nature is a space free of judgement, allowing us to dissolve identity away from the city’s ever-perceiving neons.

“When I’m around the trees, I am breathing in the oxygen that they were so kind enough to offer, allowing my nerves to be calmed by the Earth, allowing the wind and breeze to kiss my face. I’m allowing things just to exist, and I don’t have to think too much about how I show up or how people experience me,” Dua says.

In ‘unruly’, they find a kindred spirit in serpentwithfeet, exploring the self through hushed, stringed-back harmonies. Inspired by Hunter × Hunter, Dua treats anime as another escape route, admiring the morphing, god-like characters. “They’re able to tap into abilities that humans aren’t able to tap into. I think that’s a reflection of a part of my trans identity that a lot of other queer and gender non-conforming people can relate to, wanting to exist outside of your body, and anime being a perfect way to do that,” they say. 

The record lives in a time-space of turmoil, but unlike the reality of rejection and violence, it offers trans people and wider humanity a paradoxical happy ending. “I was experiencing all this and wanting to cling onto a profound sense of connection with not one particular love but a more holistic love that speaks to the human spirit.”

This year, we witnessed darkness amassing our own and neighbouring universes, consuming the past and the future, forcing the seemingly doomed present upon us. Yet darkness lets us see the light more clearly, and Dua’s light of love is a beacon for the hungry ghost we’re afraid to become. 

“Love is a condition of how we’re taught it, and because Sudanese people are so prone to the arts as a form of showcasing our feelings to a lover, I think I can’t help that. I’m just a loverboy. Regardless of what environment I’m in, I’m going to seek that out.” 

We live on the edge of sanity, gawking into the void of our portable black mirrors overflowing with whispers of pain and a promise of temporary relief. Dua Saleh comes from the very same time-space but they step gentler. They let songs carry them. Like Dua, we must trust these songs to bring us solace and a bit of joy. And if you’re still wondering, yes, you should call them.