Mdou Moctar - Tears of Injustice

If Funeral for Justice was the sound of outrage, Tears of Injustice is the sound of grief.

Mdou Moctar’s new album is Funeral for Justice completely re-recorded and rearranged for acoustic and traditional instruments. It is an evolution of the band’s critically-adored breakout – the meditative mirror-image to the blistering original.

In July of 2023, Mdou Moctar was on tour in the United States when the president of Niger, Mohamed Bazoum, was deposed by a military junta who made him prisoner at the presidential residence. They ordered the nation’s borders closed, leaving band members Mdou Moctar, Ahmoudou Madassane, and Souleymane Ibrahim unable to return home to their families. Plans to record a companion to Funeral for Justice – then still many months from release – had been in the works already, but the idea now took on new urgency and gravity. Two days after the tour wrapped in New York City, the quartet began tracking Tears of Injustice at Brooklyn’s Bunker Studio with engineer Seth Manchester.

“We wanted to make a separate version of Funeral for people to hear,” explains the band’s US-based bassist and producer, Mikey Coltun. “We’re always playing around with arrangements at shows. We wanted to prove that we could do it on a record, too. And there’s a whole other side of the band that comes out when we play a stripped down set. It becomes something new.” 

They chose to track Tears sitting together in one room, keeping the session loose, stripped down, and spontaneous. “We didn’t really work on the arrangements prior to going in,” recalls Coltun. “We’d just play, find the feel, and do the song.” Things came together quickly, with principal recording wrapped in only two days. The hypnotic 8-minute take of ‘Imouhar’ is actually two distinct passes through the song performed in quick succession – Moctar didn’t stop playing long enough to split the takes apart. After a month, the band was able to return home to Niger and, when they did, Coltun gave Madassane a Zoom recorder to take along. The rhythm guitarist used it to record a group of Tuaregs performing call-and-response vocals, which were later added into the final mix.

On Funeral for Justice, anger at the plight of Niger and the Tuareg people is plainly expressed in the music’s volume and velocity.

On Tears, the songs retain that weight sans amplification. They are steeped in sadness, conveying the grief of a nation locked into a constant churn of poverty, colonial exploitation, and political upheaval. It is Tuareg protest music in raw and essential form. “When Mdou writes the lyrics, he typically writes them with an acoustic guitar. So you’re getting closer to that original moment,” says Coltun. “It retains heaviness, but it’s haunting.”