Mdou Moctar announce forthcoming album, Tears For Injustice

n July of 2023, Mdou Moctar was on tour in the United States when the president of Niger, Mohamed Bazoum, was deposed by a military junta who made him prisoner at the presidential residence. They ordered the nation’s borders closed, leaving band members Mdou Moctar, Ahmoudou Madassane, and Souleymane Ibrahim unable to return home to their families.

Plans to record a companion to Funeral for Justice – then still many months from release – had been in the works already, but the idea now took on new urgency and gravity. Two days after the tour wrapped in New York City, the quartet began tracking Tears of Injustice at Brooklyn’s Bunker Studio with engineer Seth Manchester.

“We wanted to make a separate version of Funeral for people to hear,” explains the band’s US-based bassist and producer, Mikey Coltun. “We’re always playing around with arrangements at shows. We wanted to prove that we could do it on a record, too. And there’s a whole other side of the band that comes out when we play a stripped down set. It becomes something new.”

They chose to track Tears sitting together in one room, keeping the session loose, stripped down, and spontaneous. “We didn’t really work on the arrangements prior to going in,” recalls Coltun. “We’d just play, find the feel, and do the song.” After a month, the band was able to return home to Niger and, when they did, Coltun gave Madassane a Zoom recorder to take along. The rhythm guitarist used it to record a group of Tuaregs performing call-and-response vocals, which were later added into the final mix.

Tracklist:

1. Funeral for Justice (Injustice Version)
2. Imouhar (Injustice Version)
3. Takoba (Injustice Version)
4. Sousoume Tamacheq (Injustice Version)
5. Imajighen (Injustice Version)
6. Tchinta (Injustice Version)
7. Oh France (Injustice Version)
8. Modern Slaves (Injustice Version)