To round off our run of Treefort profiles, we sat down with London-born “artist, curator, broadcaster, and lecturer” Nabihah Iqbal to discuss touring, life, her history with music, and the creative process behind her 2023 album, DREAMER. If you haven’t listened to the album yet, definitely throw it on while you read through! If we scheduled this properly, it celebrates the first anniversary of the album’s release!
DREAMER is Nabihah Iqbal’s second album, her first since 2017’s Weighing of the Heart. Though she started her career writing and performing electronic music under the moniker Throwing Shade as well as contributing vocals to several early SOPHIE songs, Weighing of the Heart took her back to her guitar-based roots. DREAMER takes equal inspiration from the guitar-driven world of new wave and post-punk as well as IDM and house music.
I was really into a lot of punk and metal and hardcore and then more into sort of shoegazey stuff, so that’s all there. But at the same time, I love electronic music as well, and once you get old enough to start going clubbing, and then you experience the effect that electronic music, dance music can have on you in a club scenario, and you realize how spiritual it is as well … I don’t know, those are just both my worlds. Equally, I’d say, and so that’s why the music I make is a blend of both of them. Because I feel like they can be as emotive as each other. When I first started making music under my previous moniker, Throwing Shade, it was much more electronic focused, and then it was only when I made my first album, Weighing of the Heart, I thought, “Ok, let me actually go back to the guitar and see how I can incorporate that,” but then that’s obviously become a whole journey. And now it’s amazing, playing music with a band, playing instruments live on stage. – Nabihah Iqbal
The first three tracks on DREAMER go on a guitar-driven journey through ambient (“In Light”), shoegaze (“Dreamer”), and new wave (“This World Couldn’t See Us”). As Iqbal herself told the Treefort crowd, “Dreamer” is “the one happy song I’ve ever written,” while “This World Couldn’t See Us” was inspired by Thomas Hardy’s 1891 novel, Tess of the d’Urbervilles. “Even though it was written 200 years ago, it’s still very relevant today for a lot of women and girls.” The album then veers more towards the electronic space with “Sunflower,” a song about our relationship with the work of artists who died too young. Iqbal admits she was thinking particularly about Jeff Buckley, who actually makes a cameo in the album’s cover artwork.
I feel like the main thing with any creative output, whether it’s music or any other kind of artistic discipline, is that you need to stay true to yourself, and it’s the authenticity of it which people connect with, so the spine, for me, on this album, DREAMER, is just… a lot of different things, but a lot of tough things, and I’m just so deeply connected to that music emotionally, and there’s a lot in it for me. The whole process of making it was really difficult for various reasons. It might not seem explicit when you listen to the music or when you hear the lyrics, but I’ve been touring it now for nearly a year, literally around the world, and in every single place, I find it really moving to hear how other people connect to the album and what it means to them, their specific relationship to tracks, and it makes me realize that… the music’s on its own journey, and it’s doing its own thing, and I feel like the reason why so many people are coming up to me to say that the music means so much to them and it’s helped them through hard times or soundtracked a very special time in their life or whatever it is, it’s because the… emotional truthfulness that I’ve put in the music is coming through. – Nabihah Iqbal, on the “spine” of DREAMER
Side A ends with another phenomenal ambient track, “Lilac Twilight,” before Side B begins with DREAMER’s ode to the London nightlife, “Gentle Heart.” “Gentle Heart” is, like “Sunflower,” sonically influenced a bit more by electronic dance music, and this musical motif carries through into “Sky River,” the following instrumental track. Part of Nabihah Iqbal’s artistic history is wrapped in a cultural moment of the broader electronic music zeitgeist of the 2010s.
The first time I went to New York, which was in 2010, that whole era for electronic music was really amazing and it was just a lot of good music collectives and labels and things putting stuff out, and that was when I first started also… Dabbling, I’d say, with music production, and me and my friends were already starting to put on some parties in London, and when I was in New York, there was a club night, which is kind of legendary now, called GHE20G0TH1K, which was started by this girl called Venus X, and it was a community for a lot of artists like NGUZUNGUZU, and Kelela, and Fatima Al Qadiri, and Total Freedom, and Mykki Blanco, that whole kind of New York Movement … I was just there, and I went by myself, because the friends I was staying with couldn’t go that night, but I knew I needed to go, and I just remember being in that night club, and – first of all, seeing all those people who I’d been following on Soundcloud and whose music I really loved, and this was pre-Instagram – and then just like… the feeling and the vibe of that space that night was so inspirational because… first of all, I loved how mixed it was ethnically, like all different people, the music was amazing, everyone looked so cool. Even though I was there alone, I had a really good time, and I remember getting back to where I was staying after the club night and sending this message to my friends on Facebook being like, “Guys, I just went to this GHE20G0TH1K night, it was so amazing, and it was really good inspiration, and we need to try and have that same energy in London.” Yeah, that was definitely a moment for me because it was inspiring, not in terms of just music or DJ’ing, but also the importance of creating a space and sharing a space with other people and building a musical community. – Nabihah Iqbal
To round out DREAMER, Nabihah Iqbal turns a bit more somber with “Sweet Emotion (lost in devotion),” a ballad comprised of just her voice and a synthesizer, before bringing the guitar-driven work back on the triumphant penultimate track, “A Tender Victory.” To close out the album, “Closer Lover” brings inspiration from the letters John Keats wrote for his girlfriend when he was dying in Rome and away from her. As Iqbal put it to the Treefort crowd, “I’m really giving everyone the most depressing reading list, but welcome to my life.” When asked about how she wants the broader music community to support her and her artistic journey, Iqbal was upfront and candid about the financial burden of touring, particularly overseas, but she was also quick to point out her gratitude for everything that the community has given her so far.
The best thing that people can do is, if they really love the music and the artist, you know, buy the record, buy the merch, things like that. And that’s in a very financial sense of supporting because it’s so hard to do music full-time unless you get really famous and are making loads of money, but it’s tough, it’s really tough. I’ve been in music for ten years, and it’s still intense. People see the Instagram side of it, and then it looks like, “Wow, you’re smashing it.” I’m grateful for everything, and I feel so lucky that I’m even able to do the thing I love the most as my full-time job, but there’s moments where it just feels quite stressful, especially with touring and the cost of touring, but then… I don’t know, that’s just like the transactional thing, but I guess in a sort of deeper way, it’s just like, if you love the music, then yeah, try and come to the shows, tell your friends about it… When there’s music I like, I always buy it, I rarely stream it because artists do not get paid from that, and now, really, I just want to start up my own record label so that I’ve got more control over everything, because even working with other labels is sometimes really tricky and frustrating. I just want to try and make my experience of working in music as good as possible, and sometimes that means just taking everything into your own hands, but it would be a dream of mine to do that. And then also release other people’s music and give them a positive experience of what it’s like to work with a record label. [laughs] – Nabihah Iqbal
If you haven’t given DREAMER a listen yet, do so below, and be sure to purchase it on Bandcamp if you’re a fan! Keep up with Nabihah on Instagram, and catch her on tour when you can. She has plenty of European dates this summer, including both a DJ set and a live set at Glastonbury 2024!
Leave a comment