“5 Days” starts with soothing string plucks, where Dua Saleh’s vocals are calling, mesmerizing, and powerful. At the end, it aggravates into a distorted, chaotic maelstrom of rigid percussion, allowing Saleh to unleash vocals that feel like a desperate let-out to what they are holding onto. The opening track of their sophomore album, Of Earth & Wires, serves as a staggering introduction to a record defined by profound friction. Saleh, a Sudanese-American artist operating at the bleeding edge of alternative R&B and electronic music, has crafted a brilliant document of contemporary anxiety, pitting our supposedly organized society against the force of the natural world.
“B r e a t h e” is a song that seeks to capture the atmosphere of a world gasping for oxygen. Driven by floaty electronic production, bubbling beats, and organ-like synthesizers that carry the polished rhythmic precision of Kevin Parker’s later work with Tame Impala, the track tickles the ear while posing a crucial, literal question: “Are you feeling the air around me? / Are you feeling the breeze?”. It is the perfect essence of the album’s core tension, the organic colliding violently with the synthetic.
Following their 2024 debut, I SHOULD CALL THEM, Saleh retreated to the studio with executive producer Billy Lemos (known for his meticulous work with SZA and Tinashe) to process a period marked by both profound personal romance and inescapable environmental collapse. The conceptual foundation for Of Earth & Wires was laid after a series of natural disasters seemed to dog Saleh’s every move across the globe: rampant wildfires blazing dangerously close to their home in Los Angeles, followed closely by severe climate-related flooding they experienced while living in Cardiff, Wales. On this record, these global catastrophes act as a backdrop and a twisted mirror for the capricious, messy relationship drama revealing in the lyrics.
Nowhere is this synthesis of environmental terror and emotional turbulence more evident than on “Flood”. Built during an unusually fluid, free-flowing jam session in Minneapolis with local producer Psymun, the track features the distinctive, emotive register of Justin Vernon of Bon Iver. Vernon freestyled the song’s hook in the moment, delivering a cathartic performance that pushed Saleh to confront their own buried grief. The resulting track acts as a gorgeous, softer allegory for fighting to stay afloat rather than drowning in the wreckage of the past..
Of Earth & Wires mutates across genres with an erratic, brilliant energy that perfectly matches the album’s themes. On the brief but potent “Cállate”, Saleh masterfully mixes the sway of bossa nova rhythms with the frantic, programmed pace of drum ‘n’ bass to soundtrack a tense, “will-they-or-won’t-they” romantic encounter. The excellent “Firestorm” leans heavily into an earthy, funky R&B groove, finding the pocket even while the threat of actual blazes crackles just out of frame. Saleh anchors the heavy experimentation in this compilation with an undeniable, resonant pop sensibility.
The album also acts as a vital conduit for Saleh’s heritage, seamlessly connecting Sudanese folk traditions and mythic language into the futuristic, club style production. On the upbeat, defiant “I Do, I Do”, they interpolate an ancient Sudanese proverb into the verse: “He who mixes poison is bound to lick his fingers”. It is a stark, ancient warning tucked inside a moment of radical liberation, as Saleh ultimately resigns to the harshness of the elements, singing, “Ain’t no cure for the sun / So let it beat down on you / Maybe you can heal”.
By the time the album reaches its eleventh and final track, the rage and desperation that fueled “5 Days” have alchemized into a hard earned, exhausted peace. The experimental closer “Anemic” follows the fantastic “ALL IS LOVE” and functions like the final, exhaling scene of a fatiguing, beautiful film. It features a breathtaking spoken-word performance from aja monet, who steps into the fading instrumentals to recite, “Truthfully floating in the swamp of eyes / Love is an allness, open-ended sky”. It is a profound declaration of hope that refuses to erase the horrors that preceded it, choosing instead to fully and honestly process them.
Of Earth & Wires is a triumph of both emotional endurance and musical creativity. Dua Saleh has successfully quantified the tensions of 2026, the relentless encroachment of technology, the literal burning of the earth, the messy reality of human connection, and forged it into a definitive record of its time. It is the sound of an artist watching the world catch fire, and finding a way to breathe through the smoke.
