Dua Saleh is on a quest for home, humanity and renewal 

PHOTOGRAPHY Braden Lee

For Dua Saleh, the notion of home is directly tied to our presence on earth and our actions toward it. Having moved from Sudan to Minnesota as a young child because of displacement tied to the Sudanese Civil War, they grew up precociously aware of systemic oppression, the destructive effects of war on nature, and the importance of community and environment safeguarding.

Poetry was one of Saleh’s first outlet for these sentiments, with their artistic acumen coming to the surface as early as age 4. Soon, however, they felt that just that practice wasn’t enough to completely nurture and fulfil their creative potential, so they connected with producer Mike Frey to experiment with recording music. Not surprisingly, Saleh ended up performing an entire track in a single take, with Frey manually extending the beat to keep up as they sang. By 2021, the Minneapolis-raised artist had released a trilogy of genre-bending EPs – Nūr (2019), Rosetta (2020), and Crossover (2021). Then, between 2021 and 2024, the polymath cemented acting into their already impressive array of creative talents, portraying the character Cal Bowman in the third and fourth season of Netflix series Sex Education.

Saleh’s debut album I SHOULD CALL THEM came out in 2024, defining their style with a gloomy blend of R&B, rap, and indie-rock songs. With lyrics seesawing between confident and lovesick, the album follows a somewhat loose concept: two lovers meet, break up, and reunite against the backdrop of an apocalypse. Despite being more of a scaffolding for the somber atmosphere of their work, that dystopian storyline continues in the 31 year-old’s latest LP, Of Earth & Wires, produced by Billy Lemos (SZA, Paris Texas, Tinashe) and written with Midwestern indie-folk pride Justin Vernon (Bon Iver), who collaborated on standout track ‘Firestorm’ and features in ‘Flood’, ‘Keep Away’, and ‘Glow’. “I asked myself – what would it be like for the lovers in the first album to survive an actual apocalypse?” they explain, recalling a period of intense grief due to the loss of family members.

Blending indie pop, noise rock, spoken-word poetry, gentle Sudanese folk, and R&B, Of Earth & Wires takes visual form in the image of land overcome by cables, perfectly representing the unrestrained technological proliferation engulfing nature. The singer and actor encapsulates this tension by gravitating towards a sonic duality through the project: warm, harmonious arrangements that feel organic and human, contrasted with flashes of harsh, heavily produced effects. 

Contemplating planet demise and societal collapse, Saleh reflects on loss, environmental catastrophe, and the power of queer love above greed and eerie technological advancement. “A lot of us fear it because of AI militarization, which is depleting the water sources and being used to bomb sacred landscapes, religious and historic sites. It feels very haunting, and a lot of us are removed from the reality of it even while engaging with it, but we can’t really escape it,” they point out, injecting not only their personal experience into the worldbuilding of the album, but also the shared feeling of impending doom and our perceived inability to prevent it. 

Grief and natural catastrophe

“A lot of the album is about grief,” says Saleh. “I was grieving family members that had been lost in Sudan, and it felt like the world had already ended for me.” That devastation found an unlikely mirror during their time filming Sex Education in Cardiff, where repeated climate-related floods transformed into a haunting metaphor threaded throughout Of Earth & Wires.” There was an immense amount of flooding that was happening in Cardiff as well as Pontcanna while I was there,” they recount. “I think I witnessed about ten floods, and I was so shocked by them. It felt really eerie because I was grieving, so there was a weird synchronicity that felt startling.”

The collaboration with Vernon helped Saleh approach these daunting emotions, as he took on the songwriting with them and left space for Saleh to mentally reconnect with their struggle.“It was very inspiring to see him be so transparent about his emotions,” they say, recalling the recording of single ‘Flood’, which turns their experience of the natural calamity into an allegory for emotional inundation, rather than a purely literal event. 

“I had to sit for a second and let him record as much as possible, not just because I knew it would be wonderful, but also because I had a blockage with that.” At the time, they explain, confronting those emotions directly felt almost unbearable: “I was grieving a lot right then, but I thought if I had to confront it at that very moment, I don’t know what that would have done for my emotions long term.” The collaboration ultimately pushed Saleh toward a deeper vulnerability, allowing the song to become not only about catastrophe, but also a cathartic release.

With ‘Firestorm’ – also produced with Vernon and backed by the Trans Chorus of Los Angeles – Saleh extends the album’s apocalyptic imagery by drawing on the reality of California wildfires and broader climate collapse, contextualised into a coastal love song as they clasp their sweetest melodies and tones.

I had to sit for a second and let him record as much as possible, not just because I knew it would be wonderful, but also because I had a blockage with that.

Poetry and dramatic arts

As an actor, writer, and singer, Saleh is accustomed to processing upheaval through layered forms of expression. That approach carries into Of Earth & Wires, a project that often turns catastrophe into narrative structure. While developing the music video for ‘Firestorm’, the artist drew directly on their acting experience to refine how emotion is embodied on screen, especially in moments of contradiction and fragility. “Those opposing feelings of bittersweet nostalgia, grief, the warmth of a lover at a time of and dire disarray and that feeling of hope, all of those were emoted more intently into the music video through the help of my time in Sex Education,” they point out.

Poetry remains a consistent thread through that wider practice, both as origin and ongoing influence, especially through collaboration with surrealist blues poet Aja Monet for closing track ‘ALL IS LOVE’. “It was a reminder to be a little bit softer with how I approach messaging and music,” continues Saleh, describing Monet’s presence as something that reshaped their approach to expression and contrasting it with their own instinct toward intensity. “I’m rock and roll, baby. I have a lot of grit to me,” they laugh. “Sometimes it’s okay to have somebody who can wash over the Florida waters. I’m very grateful to have had that mother Gaia wisdom, the divine feminine in there,” they say of Monet’s influence, framing it in more elemental terms, thinking of the poet’s book Florida Water: Poems, and her unwavering response to the environment that is typical of the inhabitants of the Sunshine state. 

Greek and Welsh mythology 

Across Of Earth & Wires, mythology and spiritual symbolism are both ornamental and foundational, offering Saleh a way to frame grief, violence, and ecological collapse through archetypal storytelling. This is especially clear on the opening song ‘5 Days’, which directly invokes the figure of Greek Titan and fire thief Prometheus as a mythic lens for suffering and endurance: “You cry and so to / shield your marred skin / under Prometheus’ spell / But the moon still beats / her foot to the Earth.” whispers Saleh in the last 15 seconds of the song, reciting their own poetry which is integrated directly into the track right after an array of distorted screaming vocals. “It really helped me to write the screamo, hyper pop element of the song,” they reveal. “The character of Prometheus is an antagonist, but you have empathy for him because they’ve just gone through so much violence and they’re experiencing so much grief, they’re just wrapped up in bloodshed and wounds that make it hard not to understand.”

After their experience filming in Wales, this mythological thread has also extended beyond Greek references into Welsh folklore, where Saleh briefly mentions Welsh master of mischief Gwydion fab Dôn as one of their personal favourites, while they still develop this reference into a fixed narrative, identifying it as part of a broader fascination with mythic characters and shifting moral worlds, where such figures function as imaginative touchpoints within their wider creative language.

The main theme in this album is home; [Earth] is home to all of us, and we all have experiences with environmental disaster in some capacity.

Diasporic identity

Throughout the offering, Saleh threads together diasporic identity through a shifting sense of home that is both personal and planetary. “The main theme in this album is home, [earth] is home to all of us, and we all have experiences with environmental disaster in some capacity,” they emphasise, positioning displacement as a shared global condition.

This perspective extends into track ‘Anemic,’ which features Sudanese artist Gaidaa, whose shared cultural and ecological awareness becomes part of the album’s emotional and political fabric. “Having a young, femme Sudanese artist who also cares about the environment and supports different movements in solidarity with one another was also a reference that I had for a lot of the writing in this album,” explains the singer, referencing different social justice movements in different cities and how they were in solidarity with each other. “All of it is connected.” 

Flanking their own personal experience with displacement, the ongoing conflict in Sudan is also a central emotional undercurrent in Saleh’s work, shaping both the urgency and texture of the album. Track ‘I Do, I Do’ incorporates  Sudanese proverb “He who mixes poison is bound to lick his fingers” alongside the typically-North African sound of the oud, played by Malek Vossough, anchoring the song in Sudanese musical and cultural lineage. 

That sense of convergence becomes especially meaningful against the backdrop of a worldview shaped by pessimism and environmental anxiety, which Saleh also connects to growing up in the midwest and its cultural associations with darkness and cold. “Frank B. Wilderson coined the term Afropessimism, and he’s from Minnesota,” they giggle.

Queer love and self expression as resilience

Within the wider emotional landscape of Of Earth & Wires, queer love emerges as a sustaining force for Saleh and a form of resilience against collapse, grief, and political uncertainty. “I keep finding pockets of queer joy in life, and a lot of the album is about queer love and its resilience,” they say, going back to the characters presented throughout their recent releases.  “At the end, it feels like the lovers have come together.” 

Moreover, Saleh describes a gradual shift toward hope through community, organising, and interpersonal care. “I was guided and shifted into a more hopeful approach by somebody who is also an organiser. I used to be an organiser myself, so I felt like I needed that hope, because without it, how can we keep prospering and trying to exist?” They add that this continues to shape their present-day coping and creativity: “Overall, I’ve been trying to do that in my personal life. I’ve been coping with emotions, talking to journalists, and doing things that remind me of what feels hopeful right now.”

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