For an artist only just releasing his debut album, 28-year-old Mustafa Ahmed has already been a remarkable number of different things: an acclaimed performance poet, who apparently began attracting acclaim aged 12. A founder member of the Canadian hip-hop collective Halal Gang. A director whose short film Remember Me, Toronto featured Drake, among others, discussing his personal experience of gun violence in the city. A collaborator on Valentino’s autumn/winter 2019 womenswear collection. A songwriter for hire, knocking out hits for Camila Cabello, the Jonas Brothers, Shawn Mendes and Justin Bieber. It’s already quite the CV, but Dunya fully introduces him in a role he first tried out on his 2021 EP When Smoke Rises: that of an acoustic singer-songwriter.
Ahmed’s style has often been described as folk, although it fits that particular generic heading only in the loosest sense: the comparisons to Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell may have more to do with shared nationality than what Dunya actually sounds like. It sits somewhere between Jack Johnson’s easy-going sound – you could easily imagine Johnson coming up with the melody of Name of God or What Good Is a Heart? – and the mush-mouthed angst of James Blake, who appeared on When Smoke Rises.
