With A New Album and a Netflix Series, the Sudanese-American Navigates a Perilous Future
By Jeff McCord
In the album I Should Call Them, two lovers cross paths during the end of time. It’s the stuff of fantasy, yet Sudanese-American Dua Saleh calls the dystopian setting on their full-length debut album ‘my story’.
“I felt like my world was collapsing because of everything that was happening,” Saleh explains. “It’s been ongoing since 2020. People have been protesting the different things that happened. And since the coup [in Sudan] happened recently, a lot of my family have lost a few members. My world has been this apocalyptic mindscape that I can’t escape. I was also lamenting about relationships, like ahhh, I really want to call them, I miss you so much, but I don’t want to call you because you’re toxic. I was toxic. I want to reconcile and apologize to you. And I actually did that. I reached out to a couple of people because I matured and realized ‘yo, you need to work on some things too’. It’s not just like a one way street. So it was the combination of those things, me being in that apocalyptic mindset and me wanting to talk about relationships because I don’t really address those in therapy as often as I should, I just talk about childhood stuff. As you know, I am a refugee displaced person, so I just talk about things that I experienced in childhood and moving around in poverty, all those things that I experienced as a child. But yeah, I needed to talk about relationships and I realized that when I didn’t have time for myself on my first tour, it just made me a crybaby, really sad.”
Whew. Saleh, meeting with me after their 1A session, speaks with speed and intensity, almost without stopping to breathe. It’s the same hyper-focus applied to their poetic lyrics, set to a fluid hybrid of electronic pop and r&b.
Duah Saleh in Studio 1A 1.29.25
When just five years old, Saleh and family fled a Sudanese civil war in the 1990s, leading a nomadic existence for some time, eventually settling in Saint Paul, Minnesota. For Saleh, memories of that time are fleeting.
By high school, Saleh was channeling their intensity into poetry, sociology and gender studies, leading walkouts alongside the NAACP to protest their high school’s pipeline from class to prison. Community activism came naturally to Saleh.
“I understand what it’s like to be hurt by a system and wanting people to care for each other and wanting to care for another human being. It’s good to be a global citizen and to care for the next person over. Plus, my grades were really bad, so I really had to do extracurricular stuff. I was literally only good at humanities and math and science.”
Saleh continues. “I’ve always been passionate about environmental justice. I worked for the city in high school and I would set up huge recycling dumps, community gardens, and try to get people to actually care about the environment, helping folks in North Minneapolis who have to deal with their lungs being tore up by an incinerator.”
These same forces led to I Should Call Them’s prescient doomsday setting. “I really wanted to bring the earth into it. We all have a profound love for Earth. There’s toxicity in the way that we interact with Earth, literal toxic waste. It was an important metaphor because the earth is fighting back, and we’re reaping the consequences of it. I live in L.A. and I watch people’s houses burn down and people who I know who lost homes. This was just me, naming what’s happening in our reality and talking about this relationship that we should hold on to with Earth before we disappear.”
It was while at Augsburg University, and almost without warning, that Saleh’s poetry first took on a musical component.
“I kept singing to my activist friends and they would invite me to clubs for some reason. They’d be like, ‘Hey, can you do an a cappella set right before we do our thing?’ That’s how people discovered that I could sing.”
Saleh’s music is stylistically varied but with a common denominator; it casts a brooding and hypnotic spell. This comes, at least in part, from what Saleh admits was a sheltered childhood, listening to a combination of traditional Sudanese music and 40s jazz.
“I lived on a street where the Selby Jazz Fest happened every year, so we literally were immersed in music as if God wanted it to happen. Everybody sings along to or the old time country style of folk singing with a group of people like around a campfire. That’s how Sudanese people are, they will bust out into a song from the town that has been passed down in generations. You’ll see my aunties with drums and you’ll see some guy strumming an oud and being super crazy. It’s just commonplace. Listening to music was so integrated into my life as a child.”
Before long, Saleh’s music found its way to the well-known Minneapolis producer Psymun. Saleh had already been recording, and with Psymun’s help, by 2018, there was enough material to release an EP, Nur. Psymun helped shape the recordings, but Saleh already had a strong sense of what they wanted, and the public responded. Suddenly, it wasn’t just friends; the likes of Pitchfork and Robert Christgau were singing Saleh’s praises.
Two more EPs followed Nur, each building their fanbase. And the powerful songs of I Should Call Them (released late 2024, featuring Grammy-nominated producers Roget Chahayed and 1Mind) have only swelled the numbers for Saleh.
That, and, oh yeah, one more thing – a recurring role on the Netfilx series Sex Education.
“It was so shocking for me for that to happen. They found me through music. I think they just looked up nonbinary artists and were trying to see what I was about. They reached out to my management and they asked me to audition. I got nervous just because I hadn’t done a film thing before. I’m not really an actor. But this new acting stuff is a thrill. It feels wild to be embedded into the fabric of history in that way. People think that I shy away from it, and my publicist probably wants me to focus just on music right now on the label side. But really, I’m so grateful to the show and it changed my life. You know what I mean? It is just so random. A blessing from the sky.”
CREDITS
Musicians:
Dua Saleh – vocals; Jesse Schuster – piano, guitar
KUTX Staff:
Producer: Deidre Gott; Audio Post Mix: Jake Perlman; Video Edit: Renee Dominguez; Audio Engineers: Jake Perlman, Rene Chavez; Audio Assistant: Kendall Barnes; Cameras: Renee Dominguez, Deborah Cannon; Patricia Lim; Portraits: Patricia Lim; Session Host: Laurie Gallardo
