Rightly or wrongly, the sleeve of ‘Of Earth & Wires’ suggests something earthy and organic — the kind of desert blues mysticism associated with Tinariwen or Ali Farka Touré. Instead, Dua Saleh’s second album arrives as a far more synthetic and digitally fractured experience: an ambitious collision of art-pop, experimental R&B, spoken word and dystopian electronics that often feels suspended somewhere between ecological collapse and a nightclub comedown.
Conceptually, it’s difficult to fault the record’s scope. Climate anxiety, AI paranoia, displacement and the ongoing devastation in Sudan all hover over the album, giving it a heaviness that occasionally recalls the more cerebral end of progressive R&B. At its best, Saleh manages to turn those huge themes into something emotionally immediate rather than merely topical.
Opener 5 Days is easily the strongest example. Beginning with delicate acoustic guitar before collapsing into industrial percussion and shouted vocals, it feels genuinely unstable in an exciting way — like several genres fighting for space at once. The tension between the organic and ultra-modern quickly becomes the album’s central idea.
Elsewhere, Keep Away, featuring Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon, drifts into woozy experimental soul, Vernon’s soft-focus harmonies helping anchor one of the album’s more emotionally coherent melodies. Firestorm, meanwhile, wraps a smoky 2000s-style R&B track around imagery of environmental disaster, although the production ultimately feels more seductive than genuinely catastrophic.
That emotional distance becomes a bit of an issue. There’s no shortage of inventive production choices or versatile songwriting here — drum and bass, folk, ambient electronics and gospel textures all drift in and out of the mix — but the songs themselves often feel elusive. Every time we drift towards the mysticism promised by the cover, it is undercut by some studio flourish or vocal effect. Individual moments linger, yet the album as a whole never quite settles into something fully immersive.
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