Ali Sethi’s debut album, Love Language, begins with a song you’re not allowed to hear. The delicate keys and candlelit croon of “O Balama (Censored Love Song)” are intermittently interrupted by squalls of radio-jamming static before being buried under a dystopian barrage—whirring helicopter blades, distant screams, bass that explodes like artillery. It’s a poignant opening that lays out the album’s stakes with cinematic clarity: a voice shaped by centuries of syncretic South Asian musical traditions, straining to be heard over the white noise of nationalism, identity politics and state-sanctioned erasure.
This isn’t just a metaphorical struggle. In May this year, following four days of military clashes between India and Pakistan, the Indian government ordered streaming platforms to stop hosting content originating from Pakistan. Sethi—a U.S. citizen who lives in New York, but was born and raised in Lahore—suddenly found himself cut off from his biggest market. His Instagram account was blocked in India and much of his catalog disappeared from major streaming platforms, including his 2022 breakthrough hit, “Pasoori.” Apparently, the song’s central message—of love as an antidote to the divisions imposed upon us—posed too much of a risk to “national security.”
Censorship is just one of the threats dramatized by “O Balama”’s martial cacophony. In Pakistan, Sethi’s queer identity has made him a target of the religious right. In 2023, in response to false rumors that he had married his partner, Pakistani-American painter Salman Toor, he was subjected to a wave of homophobic trolling, including calls for his execution. In the United States, Trump’s return to the White House has coincided with a surge in anti-immigrant rhetoric and Islamophobic hate crime. All over the world, it seems like the ways of being that Sethi champions—borderless, pluralistic, grounded in a sense of shared humanity—are on the retreat, fighting a desperate rearguard action against bigotry and intolerance.
On Love Language, Sethi goes on the counterattack, crafting effervescent, playfully subversive pop songs that don’t merely challenge the binaries that bind us, but dissolve them altogether. Punjabi folk collides with blown-out hyperpop; Hindustani classical ragas and flamenco guitar dance an intricate waltz; Sufi devotional meditations are draped in lo-fi, banjo-flecked Americana. East and West, the sacred and the sensual—it all blurs into one phantasmagorical fever dream.
On the Bollywood-meets-bossa-nova track “Hanera,” Sethi sings of forbidden love in innuendo-laced Punjabi as tabla flourishes ripple over club-ready bass and metronomic, four-to-the-floor percussion. The warp-speed tabla rhythms of raga-meets-reggaeton cut “Hymn 4 Him” swing in dizzying spirals; Sethi sings of waving “our flags in the enemy’s face,” conjuring images of whirling dervishes at a Pride march. Standout track “Lovely Bukhaar” hovers somewhere between campy striptease and sex-drunk meltdown. Sethi’s blown-out vocals—grainy with digital compression and feverish desire—duet with a heavily vocoded sarangi over finger-snap percussion as he sings of love as an illness, an obsession, an addiction so powerful that it overwhelms both body and mind.