The more you listen to Mustafa, you begin to realize that the juxtaposition of the gritty street life he depicts and the gentle music he makes shouldn’t be much of a juxtaposition at all. Half of the singer-songwriter’s debut project, When Smoke Rises, has been released as singles, with music videos capturing the brick and concrete exteriors of Toronto’s Regent Park housing project, where he was born and raised. In the video for “Stay Alive,” a searing portrait of his community and his commitment to it, black and brown men in chains and hoodies make elaborate hand gestures to the camera as Mustafa pleads for their survival. He offers himself to them to ensure it. “Just put down that bottle, tell me your sorrows,” he sings. “I care about you fam.” His folk-inflected music, tender and calm, and these videos, serene and defiant, honor his neighborhood with the softness so often absent in attitudes and policy towards poor people.
On “Stay Alive,” Mustafa’s friend, Regent Park rapper Rax, explains that he’s just trying to keep his head above water. “I like to hear [the song’s snippet of] my boy [Rax], who has only been equated to violence, and now people outside the community are hearing a sadness in his voice. A more holistic picture,” Mustafa said in an interview. Rax is still alive, but several people Mustafa has known are not, like rapper Smoke Dawg, pictured with him on the project’s cover, or Ali Rizeig, to whom he dedicated a single. Throughout When Smoke Rises, Mustafa’s grief for the friends he could not save is laid bare.
The 24-year-old has been trying to make sense of the calamity in his backyard since he was a child. He started to earn local acclaim for his spoken word poetry at age 12. In one breathless entry from his youth that still lingers online, he asks, “Why do people have to live in fear? Why do people have to assume that death is near?” Mustafa has evolved into a more measured writer. His new release offers a sequential narrative of grief that is as strong as it is minimal. Early glimmers of hope that Mustafa can help his friends survive become confrontations with the inevitability of loss. Those confrontations become rage on “The Hearse,” where Mustafa skillfully pivots from riding out for vengeance to looking inward for consequences: “I know what’s at stake, but you made yourself special,” he sings to his adversary. “I wanna throw my life away for you.” The project descends into sadness as Mustafa settles into his grief, owning it, and naming his ultimate desire: to get back all that’s been taken.
The power of Mustafa’s confessionals isn’t limited to their words. His singing is plain but arresting, like looking out to a lush field or up to a blue sky. On When Smoke Rises, his voice is most often smooth and restrained, making the sparse moments of emotional trilling even more poignant. Take his duet with Sampha — a perfect contemporary — called “Capo,” where he transitions from a quiet rasp to a forceful falsetto over intricate piano, signaling a breaking point in the monotony of mourning that he describes moments before. The project’s backdrop is a cascade of subtle synths, delicate guitar and bass, light drums, and gorgeous keys that ebb and flow with intention. Mustafa’s collaborators here are some of the brightest in music: super producer Frank Dukes (Frank Ocean, Drake, Rihanna) is credited on every song and heartwrencher James Blake contributes to two tracks.
Mustafa’s choice to sing of hood tragedy in folk music is effective, not only because it is beautiful and stirring, but because it feels unexpected. In popular music, portrayals of the horrors of poverty and violence often come through intense raps and atop booming 808s. This, of course, is also music Mustafa responds to, as influenced by Nas and Future as he is by Leonard Cohen and Sufjan Stevens. But Mustafa’s music, like his life, is the melding of disparate experiences that aren’t so disparate in the light. There’s a fine line between being poor in your home country and poor in a new land; between life and death; between acclaim and disregard. Mustafa, like so many black artists before him, has made public his deepest despair. In doing so, he provides a unique model of the gentleness and care his community should be held with.
ALBUM REVIEWS
Canadian duo Softcult name their stunning first album after the well known Alexander Den Heijer line “When a flower doesn’t bloom, you fix the environment in which it grows, not the flower.” That belief in brave transformation and choosing something healthier runs through everything Mercedes and Phoenix Arn Horn do. The twin sisters know that idea intimately after spending over ten years in pop rock outfit Courage My Love, before stepping away in 2020 when major label life began to feel too restrictive to survive creatively.
Softcult emerged soon after in 2021 with ‘Another Bish’, a sharp edged dream pop statement that made it clear they would not be boxed in. A run of four gritty EPs followed, steeped in Riot Grrrl spirit, alongside hand assembled zines, an intensely loyal online following and high profile support slots with Muse and Incubus. Each move has helped build a carefully protected DIY universe where honesty and release come first.
The sisters have never sounded more grounded or self assured than they do on their self produced debut ‘When A Flower Doesn’t Grow’. The album loosely traces the process of escaping systems of abuse, control and expectation, opening with the weightless ‘Intro’. From there, the grimy surge of ‘Pill To Swallow’ finds Mercedes confronting how bleak the world can feel in 2026 with the line “no more promises of better days”, while still choosing resilience over surrender.
‘When A Flower Doesn’t Grow’ is packed with songs that run on pure fury. ‘Hurt Me’ erupts as a blistering release that recalls Nirvana at their most savage, while ‘Tired!’ barrels forward as a no nonsense punk blast aimed at suffocating pressures, with Mercedes biting back “tired of the expectations, tired of your explanations.” Elsewhere, the hazy drive of ‘Naïve’ and the deceptively bright ‘Queen Of Nothing’ bristle with restrained anger, and the charging ‘16/25’ pulls no punches when calling out predatory behaviour. ‘She Said, He Said’ cuts just as sharply, its spoken word delivery flipping between mockery and menace to deepen the band’s guitar led resistance.
Softcult’s debut feels like a natural step forward from their spiky punk roots while also opening doors to new sounds. The loud soft swing of ‘Not Sorry’ bursts with relief and joy, marking the most carefree moment they have ever put on record. At the other end, closing track ‘When A Flower Doesn’t Go’ strips everything back, blending acoustic folk with scorched post rock textures. The duo sound at ease moving between these poles, but it is the fragile hush of ‘I Held You Like Glass’ that lands hardest, leaving room for vulnerability and quiet heartbreak to linger.
