Aziza Brahim

On the front cover of Aziza Brahim’s new album, Sahari, a young girl poses in ballet shoes and a glistening white tutu. It’s a common childhood scene, but it’s tipped upside down. She’s not privileged and the backdrop isn’t a comfortable suburban home. She’s an exile, living nowhere near her homeland, and behind her stand the tents and buildings of a refugee camp. There’s a desert on the ground and a burning sky above. Yet even in this bleakness, she has optimism. She believes in a better future.

Sahrawi singer-songwriter activist Aziza Brahim’s fifth album Mawja (Wave in Hassaniya Arabic) is fashioned from a simple but powerful foundational palette: Saharan and Iberian percussion entwining with stately guitars and warm, enveloping bass.

Raised in a refugee camp in Algeria, Aziza Brahim embodies and mourns the displacement of North Africa’s Sahrawi people. Her ascent has been steady rather than spectacular, her breakthrough coming with 2014’s Soutak, an elegant acoustic set that drew from her adopted Barcelona home. Here, Brahim embraces the electric desert blues popularised by Tinariwen and Tamikrest (with whom she shares producer Chris Eckman). It’s a buoyant sound – Brahim’s voice is too airy for drones and chants – led by rolling pieces such as Calles de Dajla and followed by slow, contemplative blues. At its heart is a title track grieving for the exiled thousands stranded in an inhospitable tract of Western Sahara, whose only escape is “music and imagination”.