Guitar luminary + Tuareg folk hero Omara “Bombino” Moctar knows the nomadic life well. Being constantly on the road for his music while also perpetually on the move throughout the Sahel region of Africa is the norm. So when the pandemic brought the world to a screeching halt, Bombino found himself in an unfamiliar space: being in one place. What resulted was Sahel, the follow-up to 2018’s Deran, a record that turned Bombino into the first-ever GRAMMY-nominated artist from Niger.

This new collection of songs, named after the African region spanning East-West from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea, is Bombino’s most personal, powerful, and politically-minded work to date. It’s also his most sonically diverse, a quality he set out to achieve from the start, and one that is meant to directly mirror the complex tapestry of cultures and people that make up the Sahel region itself.

To bring the songs to life, Bombino worked with Welsh producer/ mixer David Wrench (David Byrne, Frank Ocean, Caribou, Goldfrapp, Erasure, The xx, Sampha), decamping with his bandmates to a studio in Casablanca for ten days to lay down the album. The songs that comprise Sahel range in theme from the plight of the Tuareg, to the ache of lost love, to the follies of youth.