Dua Saleh’s ‘Of Earth and Wires’ is a grief-soaked, Afrofuturist indie-electronic album featuring Bon Iver across three tracks. Out now via Ghostly International
Dua Saleh did not write “Of Earth & Wires“ quickly. They almost always do, sometimes in thirty minutes, but this record was different. Written while navigating the deaths of a grandmother and an uncle, while watching Sudan’s civil war intensify and AI anxiety metastasize from cultural conversation into something with real military and geopolitical weight, and while continuing to film Sex Education in Wales (which flooded, by Saleh’s count, at least ten times), the album came out of a state they describe as being “in deep, deep pain.” The result is their most intentional work. You can hear it in every bar.
Released May 15 via Ghostly International, “Of Earth & Wires” is Saleh’s second LP and the follow-up to their 2024 debut “I Should Call Them,” which traced two lovers through a post-apocalyptic landscape. This album reflects on what it feels like to actually live there. The world has not improved. The apocalypse, for Saleh and for the people they write about and for, is not a metaphor. It is a condition. The question the record tries to answer is not how to escape it but how to remain human inside it.
The Collaborators as Community
The most significant creative decision on “Of Earth & Wires” is the deployment of Justin Vernon, who appears under his Bon Iver banner across three tracks: “Flood,” “Keep Away,” and “Glow.” This is not a celebrity feature as garnish. Vernon is a structural presence throughout the album’s emotional architecture. “This is the only time I’m going to get a folk pioneer in the studio,” Saleh said in an interview, half-joking, and the resulting tracks reflect genuine creative alignment rather than opportunistic pairing.
On “Flood,” one of the album’s most devastating moments, Vernon freestyled the hook in real time during a session in Minneapolis that began as an attempt at a Travis Scott track and evolved into something entirely its own. Saleh has connected the song to the Welsh floods directly: “It felt like all the endless tears that I couldn’t really tap into at the time, because I was so shellshocked from losing a grandmother.”
The full collaborator list extends the sense of community that the album’s themes demand. Gaidaa appears on “Anemic,” and aja monet closes the record on “ALL IS LOVE.” Producer Billy Lemos, known for his work with SZA and Tinashe, shapes the sonic landscape across the album, blending indie, R&B, electronic pop, Sudanese folk, UK dance, and baile funk into a palette that sounds simultaneously global and intimate.
Standout track “5 Days” is where Saleh gets most explicitly personal, describing the song as emerging from their “gay bag,” evoking Frank Ocean’s lover-boy introspection and queer Scorpio energy in the same breath. “Glow,” featuring Bon Iver, pulls plucky atmospheric guitar licks against triplet flows in a configuration that sounds unlike anything either artist has done independently. “I Do, I Do” is the album’s still center, a soulful, rasp-tinged vocal laid over unhurried, silky production that gives the record room to breathe.
Afrofuturism as Survival, Not Aesthetics
Throughout their career, Saleh has returned consistently to Afrofuturist themes, and “Of Earth & Wires” is the fullest realization of that practice. Being Sudanese, they have said, gives them a particular vantage point on what technological anxiety actually means: “As much as I don’t want AI to steal my art, I couldn’t take people’s conversation about it seriously. The real threat is not about the art, it’s about how militaristic regimes are using it against entire nation states, bombing sacred land and life.” That is a different kind of urgency than most AI-inflected cultural commentary allows itself, and it sharpens the album’s political dimension without tipping into didacticism.
What saves “Of Earth & Wires” from collapse under the weight of its subject matter is the same thing that has always distinguished Saleh’s best work: the refusal to confuse sincerity with bleakness. “Even though the world has ended for me multiple times,” they told OkayAfrica, “I still want to feel joy, bliss, and hope.” The album delivers on that want. It is grief-soaked and politically awake and formally adventurous, and it lands, finally, on something that sounds like community rather than isolation. In 2026, that is not a small thing to achieve.
“Of Earth & Wires” is out now via Ghostly International.
