Mdou Moctar’s Funeral for Justice is a powerful blend of political defiance, cultural homage, and musical mastery.

There is something monumental to Mdou Moctar’s Funeral for Justice which makes this album – the seventh studio record for the band spearheaded by the Touareg songwriter and guitarist – a complex yet essential piece of work. This is not only the result of the musical maturity underpinning the composition, although not a single beat is missed throughout the nine tracks that make up the record. As the defiant title itself suggests, Funeral for Justice is as much political statement as it is musical endeavour, and it cannot fully be understood without taking both elements into account. There is more still to it: it is also a love letter to Tamasheq, the native language in which Moctar crafts many of his lyrics and to the sound of which the instrumental portions of the tracks so often attune themselves, almost echoing its lilt and its accents; it is a portrait of Niger in particular, but which reflects so many other African realities in general, which is unflinchingly decolonial, rather than postcolonial. Yet under so many layers, it is also, and perhaps first and foremost, an eminently listenable record, which sinks its roots into different strands of guitar music tradition and manages to sound fresh and classic at the same time. Quite possibly one of the strongest musical offerings of 2024, this album has so much to unpack within it that it’s easy to forget how outright enjoyable it also is, even upon repeated replays.

The political element has always been prominent within Moctar’s artistic research, but it’s quite possibly never been so dominant as it is in this record. From its very opener – the title track that also sets the tone for the whole record both musically and thematically – the lyrics deliver a raging j’accuse against the postcolonial powers exploiting Africa for its resources; the anger running through the words is echoed, even more loudly and effective, by the raging of the guitars, which preserve the distinctive finger-picking precision of the desert blues tradition from which this band derives so much of its sound but push it to a racing pace that comes across almost frantic. This expressionistic use of guitar sounds is a red thread running through the whole record: it is true that there are solos which could have come out of the most classic album of any of the great rock glories of the 70s, but it is equally true that Moctar plays his guitar almost like it has a human voice, capable of wailing, of roaring, and of shouting at the top of its lungs. This gives the whole album a soulfulness that is impossible to ignore; as it blends sounds from the European and North American rock tradition with others that come from the lively North African music scene, it also gives a brilliant display of music as an universal language.

Speaking of the universality of language, if proof was needed that it is not necessary to resort to the medium of English for the message of a piece of music to ring loud and clear, this album is that proof. Take for instance Imouhar, a song written as a celebration of Tamasheq which is possibly the stand-out track in an album full of powerful moments, both in the way in which it blends the musicality of its language with chords that are straight out of the country rock tradition and in the way it lingers in the ear after the album is over.

It is also an incredibly precise album from a technical standpoint. It is easy to forget it – the flow of the music is so smooth that it feels in places deceptively simple – but there is a very high level of technical complexity in the delivery of this very specific kind of rock-blues sound: most certainly in the fast-paced cavalcades of tracks like Funeral for Justice or Imajighen (the latter of which is also a very good example of the way in which the record uses drums to give its music a snappy and eminently danceable tempo), but also in the ones with a broader, more rarefied sound: see Takoba for the latter, where a slower, smooth-flowing song hides between its surface a fair amount of guitar-playing finesse, or the first few bars in closing track Modern Slaves for a display of skill that would be hard to match. The maturity of the songwriting truly shines through in how tight these songs feel, and how they can be listened to multiple times with different goals: once for their straightforward enjoyability as guitar rock offerings, and again for the powerful feelings they manage to evoke, and yet again for an appreciation of the many little quirks of composition and flourishes of delivery they contain.

Not only is Funeral for Justice one of the stand-out records of 2024 from a strictly musical standpoint; it is also a fundamental record in terms of expanding the horizons of a music scene that feels, especially in the mainstream, increasingly fixated on a very narrow scope both in terms of sounds and of themes, and a bold record in terms of the themes it addresses and the ways it delivers them. It is also a sheer feat of guitar-playing on a level that is rarely equalled on live stages these days. For whatever reason one chooses to approach it, this is an album that will most certainly not disappoint.