The track is from Bombino’s new album Sahel which takes its name from the vast African region spanning East-West from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea The new album is the highly anticipated follow-up to his 2018 album ‘Deran,’ which turned Bombino into the first-ever Grammy-nominated artist from Niger.

“Aitma” is a plea for unity and solidarity across the Sahel, delivered in his native Tamasheq. “Let’s defend our people because we are the same regardless of our geographical position,” he sings while shouting out the Tuareg people throughout the region.

To bring the Sahel to life, Bombino worked closely with Welsh producer David Wrench (David Byrne, Frank Ocean, Caribou, Goldfrapp, The xx, Sampha), decamping with his bandmates to a studio in Casablanca for ten days to lay down the album. Sahel is Bombino’s most personal, powerful, and politically-minded work yet. It’s also his most sonically diverse, a quality he set out to achieve from the start, and one that is meant to directly mirror the complex tapestry of cultures and people that make up the Sahel itself. He says, “the general plight of the Tuareg is always on my mind and while I’ve addressed it in my music all along, I wanted to give it a special focus on this album.”

Elsewhere, Sahel also contains some of Bombino’s most incisive commentaries to date, lamenting the divisions amid the Tuareg people, the risks of exile, and an even greater existential threat, the loss of Tuareg culture. “Even though geographically the Sahara desert is our home, so many of the Tuareg people are denied or deprived of certain basic necessities throughout the region,” he says. “This has been motivating me a lot, the types of songs I sing and why. I want to get people thinking about the Tuareg, to represent those people who haven’t been represented. They really need a voice.”

Stream the new single HERE