We’re hugely pleased to announce that ace Malian four-piece Songhoy Blues are readying their debut album Music In Exile. It’ll be out on Transgressive Records on February 23 2015, and comes preceded by the first single, ‘Al Hassidi Tere’. We’ve got a first look at the track’s video – watch that above.
Hailing from the Songhoy ethnic group, the band were displaced from their native Gao to the country’s capital Bamako following the unrest of 2012. Once there, the band formed as a response to the situation, with guitarist Garba Toure saying: "We met up and told ourselves we couldn’t just stay shipwrecked by a crisis like this. We had to form a band." With the band to influences ranging from Malian greats such as Ali Farka Touré and Baba Salah to Hendrix and R&B, they recorded a song with the Yeah Yeah Yeah’s Nick Zinner – album opener ‘Soubour’, originally on the Africa Express album, Maison des Jeunes – who produces the full-length, alongside French music manager, Marc-Antoine Moreau. The press release also explains that the band are working on a feature film about the banning of music in Mali.
Ahead of the album’s release, the band will be playing dates in Europe and India, packing a live show which we can vouch is a blast, as witnessed at this year’s Visions festival; head to their Facebook for full details and Transgressive’s site to pre-order the album.
