It’s now a quarter of a century since Uncut first wrote about Tinariwen, when we reviewed 2001’s inaugural Festival In The Desert. At a remote site two days drive into the Sahara, we marvelled at the band’s performance under an eclipse of the moon, in front of an audience comprising sword-wielding Tuareg warriors on camels and a tiny handful of intrepid European world music fans.
It’s now a quarter of a century since Uncut first wrote about Tinariwen, when we reviewed 2001’s inaugural Festival In The Desert. At a remote site two days drive into the Sahara, we marvelled at the band’s performance under an eclipse of the moon, in front of an audience comprising sword-wielding Tuareg warriors on camels and a tiny handful of intrepid European world music fans.
The group were already veterans who had spent the best part of two decades playing the hypnotic guitar music they call ishumar or assouf for their own peoples scattered nomadically across the desert borderlands between Mali and Algeria; but that review was their first mention in any western media and the prelude to a remarkable journey that led to them winning the Uncut Music Award in 2010 for their fourth album Imidiwan and two years later a Grammy award for Tassili.
Along the way their ‘desert blues’ – as it reductively became known – picked up a host of celebrity fans including Robert Plant, Bono, Damon Albarn, Nels Cline, TV On The Radio, Kurt Vile, Mark Lanegan, Cass McCombs and Warren Ellis, all of whom have either jammed with Tinariwen live or guested on their records. Meanwhile a host of younger acts including Imarhan, Songhoy Blues and Bombino have come to the fore, influenced and inspired by Tinariwen to create an entire sub-genre of psyched-up Saharan blues-rock.
Yet if Tinariwen’s journey from gun-toting rebels who got together in a refugee camp in Libya in the 1980s to 21st-century stars of festival stages from Glastonbury to Coachella seems an effortless story of talent recognised and creativity rewarded, in reality their path has been strewn with boulders that might so easily have irrevocably blocked their path.
Forged in troubled times as exiled fighters for the Tuareg cause, there has since been the occasional uneasy truce, but the troubles have never abated as their homeland has been beset by drought, famine, coups, guerrilla wars, rebellions, sectarian violence and terrorism. The adversity reached a tipping point in 2012 when the militant Islamist group Ansar Dine overran their home in northern Mali and banned music, forcing Tinariwen into exile again in a pre-Trumpian, pre-ICE America.
They found refuge in the Mojave desert where in an arid, sparsely populated environment similar to their homeland they recorded Emmaar (2014) and parts of Elwan (2016). Unable to return home, further albums were recorded in Morocco and Mauritania. Their last album, 2023’s Amatssou, was recorded across the Sahara. By then Mali had suffered another military coup, murderous terrorists linked to Islamic State and a resurgent al-Qaeda were rampant and Russian mercenaries from the Wagner Group were carrying out summary executions.
As of 2026, the insurgency continues and western nations advise against all travel to Mali. Tinariwen’s 10th album is in many ways dominated by this worsening security and humanitarian crisis. Recorded in Imarhan’s studio in Tamanrasset in southern Algeria, it takes its title from the Hoggar mountain range, visible for miles to nomadic tribes across the Central Saharan desert and serving as a symbol of homeland and a metaphor for Tinariwen’s role as fierce and immovable ambassadors for Tuareg culture.
Three of the group’s founding members – Ibrahim Ag Alhabib, Abdallah Ag Alhousseyni and Touhami Ag Alhassane – remain and are joined here for the first time in 25 years by Tinariwen co-founder Diarra and by younger musicians from the bands Imarhan and Terakaft in a trans-generational communal summit of tribal elders and their disciples.
As for the music, all these years on, Tinariwen’s loping, syncopated rhythms and interlocking serpentine guitars now sound familiar rather than exotic, although the raw earthiness of the sound – here more acoustic and stripped-down than on much of their recent work – has lost none of its visceral power.
More than ever, though, you need the translations of their Tamasheq lyrics to grasp the full extent of the foreboding and sense of crisis that pervades the album from the opener “Amidinim Ehaf Solan”, a slow and mournful threnody for the fortunes of the Tuareg people, to the dark “Aba Malik”, a dubbed-up malediction of Beefheartian intensity directed at the Russian mercenaries who have invaded the land (“curse you Wagner/ Curse your mother!”).
On “Imidiwan Takyadam” the sweet tones of José González contrast gloriously with the earthy basso profundo of Ibrahim Ag Alhabib over a female chorus lamenting the plight of their sisters living under the “hellish tyranny” of Islamist misogyny. Imarhan’s Iyad Moussa Ben Abderrahmane provides the deep, echoing desert blues guitar lines over a rhythm of clattering hand claps on the sombre “Tad Adounya” and there’s more apocalyptic blues lamentation on “Erghad Afeweto”, which finds the Tuaregs’ desert lands on fire and populated only by “the orphaned child and the rotting carcasses of the herds.”
There are odd moments of playfulness, most notably on “Khay Erilan” which translates as “new model” and indulges Tuareg campfire dreams of owning the latest Toyota Landcruiser, like a riposte to Janis Joplin’s “Oh Lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedes Benz?” The melismatic Sudanese chanteuse Sulafa Elyas also offers a ray of sunshine on the lovely traditional folk song “Sagherat Assan”. Such light relief is welcome. Elsewhere, amid a troubling world of woe, this is Tinariwen as deep and darkly compelling as we’ve ever heard them.
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