Arooj Aftab Features on Bonobo’s New Album With ‘Fire on the Water’

Recorded at Neil Young’s legendary Broken Arrow Ranch studio, the track stands out on the album, with Arooj Aftab delivering a haunting vocal performance in Urdu.

Grammy Award-winning vocalist, composer and producer Arooj Aftab brings her distinctive style and Urdu poetry to ‘Fire on the Water,’ the collaborative new single with the finest purveyor of electronica, Bonobo, from his upcoming album, ‘Distance in Static.’

Set for release on September 11, Aftab is one of a striking cast of artists featured on the album, including names like Joy Crookes, Nilüfer Yanya, Ichiko Aoba, Nicole Miglis (of Hundred Waters) and Aanya Martin. On ‘Fire on the Water,’ the plucked guitar, cello, violin and fuzzy synths weave a gossamer web around Aftab’s craveable, inviting voice, which has been described by Bonobo as the point where he could first hear the album taking shape.

After a year defined by an expansive run of collaborations, Aftab’s link-up with Bonobo feels like a natural extension of her ever-evolving artistic practice. A long-time admirer of Bonobo and his genre-defying body of work, Aftab travelled from her Brooklyn base to Woodside, a secluded town known for its towering redwoods and hikes by the river, where Bonobo aka Simon Green recorded a large portion of the album at Neil Young’s legendary Broken Arrow Ranch studio. Emerging from these Ranch sessions was the enchanting ‘Fire on the Water,’ which evolved, almost accidentally, from a rough acoustic guitar loop recorded while Green was testing studio inputs one morning.

“I had assembled different verses of my close friend Yasra Rizvi’s poems together to voice this theme of desire and fire from afar, and I was trying to work the words and the melody around a different idea Bonobo had, but it just wasn’t flying,” recalls Aftab, who recently reimagined ‘Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)’ in Urdu with producer Anish Kumar for Riz Ahmed’s series “BAIT.”

The two abandoned the idea, went for lunch and a walk, and in the evening Green tried something else. On hearing it, Aftab responded immediately, layering vocals to produce one of the record’s standout moments.

“I was like, WAIT… this beat is inviting something, the fire on the water will work here. So I started weaving it in, line by line, and he started playing that guitar riff. We had this astonishing, hushed excitement as we kept putting the pieces together because we could feel that we were making something very special,” she adds.

Green’s meticulously processed and restrained instrumentation allows Aftab’s vocals to breathe life and longing into the words, and he was equally affected by the final result. “When that song happened, that’s when I could first see an album coming into shape,” says Green. “We were both like, ‘Oh, this is really special.’”

‘Fire on the Water ft. Arooj Aftab’ is now available for streaming across all platforms. Also releasing simultaneously is the more club-focused single, ‘Drift,’ which has quickly emerged as a firm fan favorite of Bonobo’s sets.

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