Dunya, Mustafa's full-length debut, roughly translates from Arabic to "the world in all its flaws." And to be sure, there is an entire world contained within the album – it's bursting at the seams with the novelistic attention to detail he showcased on his 2021 release, When Smoke Rises.
Mustafa has carried himself in esteemed company for a while. Collaborators on Dunya include Aaron Dessner, Rosalía, Daniel Caesar, Clairo and Nicolas Jaar, as well as creative director Ramy Youssef. But it's his world we are invited into, filled with lush islands exploring faith, death, trauma and more.
Novelistic, here, does not mean overbearing or needlessly complex – with one exception, the songs here don't cross the four-minute mark. Instead, Mustafa's piercing tone and folk music leanings give each lyric the weight it deserves, be that mournful, full of love or searching. Take "SNL," where he sings in the chorus, "Yelling 'gang gang gang' in my room / You sprayed me with perfume." In scant few words, he's able to conjure nostalgia, melancholy and camaraderie across the weight of years.
The search, or journey, is central to Dunya, an album that its creator has called an interrogation of his faith. Like any good journey, there are questions that can't be answered, and Mustafa lets those questions hang throughout the album. "What good is a heart that does not break?" he asks on one track.
Despite having written for the likes of Usher, Justin Bieber and Camilla Cabello, Mustafa shows no conscious effort toward pop stardom on Dunya – and it's all the better for it. While listeners are going to find much of themselves in the questions Mustafa asks throughout, the journey is his and his alone.
Take the end of "Gaza Is Calling," an ode to a childhood friend trapped in the occupied territories. Mustafa sings the last verse entirely in Arabic. For those not fluent, there's always Google Translate, but of course that would only approximate his pain and his memories at best. It's here he also bucks the traditional expectations of a folk ballad, with a glitchy drum breakdown to close out the track. Another swerve from the American folk music archetype includes the incorporation of the oud, a Middle Eastern lute on "I'll Go Anywhere."
There's no better encapsulation of the dichotomy between the strength of the album and the "incompleteness" Mustafa explores than "Leaving Toronto." Here, he sings with equal parts reverence and resentment for the city that shaped him; the song stands as a potent reminder of the pain it has visited upon him and his loved ones. That swirling conflict of emotions firmly coalesces into something ineffable but solid as he sings, "Still, I'm leaving Toronto / If it ever lets me go."
Wherever he goes, it's a journey solely for himself. That we're invited occasionally to check on his progress in all its disarming, emotional breadth is simply a blessing.