On Dua Saleh’s album, I Should Call Them, personal and global disaster meet.
The lyrics on this debut album discuss destruction, both of a romantic relationship and the Earth. “Basically, I was just in my feelings, and then I realized that the Earth is also in her feelings. There were a lot of parallels between my personal relationships and the relationship that humanity has with the Earth,” Dua Saleh says of the record’s inspiration.
Saleh believes that romantic love is not often given enough serious attention in art. Situationships and hookups are something to gossip about rather than be seriously considered in music, especially for queer people. But they want to change that. On the album’s second track, “want,” Saleh sings: “Almost had it, then you went and threw it all away / Keep backtracking even though the feeling ain’t the same / Now every time I’m back in L.A. / You up in my bed, it’s late / I know we probably shouldn’t but / I think I want, want, want to.
”It’s a theme repeated throughout the album—the highs and lows of unstable romantic relationships, the precariousness of them before an inevitable demise, the way that this uncertainty brews toxicity.
But, Saleh tells me, “I realized the Earth is the girl that I’m talking about. I needed to reflect upon and address the ways that the Earth is fighting back with toxicity because of feeling so hurt.” I Should Call Them has an energized, expansive sound, and Saleh’s influences are obviously wide-ranging. There are nods to indie pop and electronic. They also like to think that on this album they have “introduced a new subgenre to R&B, called black R&B—an introduction of black metal to contemporary R&B.”
I meet Saleh at their hotel in downtown Manhattan—they’re in New York to play a show at the Bowery Ballroom that night. When I arrive, Saleh greets me at the door dressed in baggy shorts and a sweatshirt, before getting back into bed and pulling the blanket over their legs. They’re getting over the flu and generally exhausted—from touring, from everything. As we talk, they sip tea and speak softly, trying to preserve their voice. It’s just weeks after the devastating L.A. fires, when the intensity and destruction of climate change could not have felt more front of mind—the graphic and unforgettable images of flames swallowing a city are stuck in both our heads. The speed at which everything seems to be falling apart has left a constant hum of anxiety and uncertainty in every conversation, in every interaction.
It is also two weeks after Trump took office, after he signed a flurry of destructive executive orders. Saleh is Black, queer, and nonbinary, existing at the intersection of several identities that Trump is actively targeting. Saleh feels a clear and intense anxiety about that: “In our current political climate and me being trans, I saw the ways that anti-trans legislation is just so sought after in the U.S.”
“The rollout for this project has been just me being forthright and honest, and me not holding back when talking about Sudan or Palestine or Yemen or Congo.”
Saleh, 30, also talks about issues outside the U.S. Originally from Sudan, they speak of the war and destruction they saw in their home country—“I have had family members pass on because of the war in Sudan”—and of how they are “feeling like the world is kind of falling apart and literally seeing my actual world fall apart.”
And these are the issues Saleh is taking on. They say that the most difficult part of being an artist right now is the constant fear of censorship. They’re also an activist and have been consistently outspoken about not just climate change but a whole suite of problems our world is facing today.
“The rollout for this project has been just me being forthright and honest, and me not holding back when talking about Sudan or Palestine or Yemen or Congo,” Saleh says. They reference the Kenyan social, environmental, and political activist Wangari Maathai as well as Greta Thunberg and other youth activists as the main artistic inspiration for the new album. Saleh has a clear and direct message to share with the world about ending injustice.
But that doesn’t mean that their vulnerability and outspokenness come without challenges. Saleh points to concern about how activists are often persecuted in America and the horrible and sometimes mysterious consequences people face for being outspoken, for trying to enact change. “There’s just a lot of pressure on environmental activists, so I’m worried about that.”
In I Should Call Them, Saleh balances all of these things—vulnerability and outspokenness, love and destruction. The album asks: How do we handle the showcasing of so much disaster? What happens when climate anxiety becomes climate grief or climate rage? And how do we navigate sharing our most intimate feelings about both personal and global destruction for everyone to hear?
“It was too much for my body. If I kept engaging with my art in that way, it would have killed me.”
Saleh’s first public artistic pursuit was slam poetry. And they were good at it. In their early twenties, they were regularly competing in slam-poetry competitions and their work was supported and amplified by Button Poetry, an independent publisher of performance poetry. They did well in competitions, and videos of their performances have received over 200,000 views on YouTube. Saleh felt as though they were gaining recognition.
But something didn’t feel right to them about this art form, about the culture of slam poetry. They say that the expectations of vulnerability seemed too high—to win, Saleh felt they had to give away as much of themself as possible. And it wasn’t on their terms. Expressing their most difficult emotions in that way became draining and unsustainable. “It was too much for my body,” they say. “If I kept engaging with my art in that way, it would have killed me.
They often found themself rocking back and forth after performances, taking intense measures to try to soothe themself, but nothing was working. They realized they needed to find another artistic practice where they felt more in control of how much they shared. So Saleh turned to music.
I ask them about the abstraction in their earlier music. I first discovered Saleh when I stumbled on their 2019 song “Warm Pants.” I loved the song immediately—the sounds are clear but what exactly is being said isn’t. The song opens with Saleh whispering a few sentences over and over again, and the effect of their voice further abstracts the words.
There’s a dreamy, out-of-reach quality to the lyrics in this period of their work. The music feels interesting and innovative but not immediately accessible. It makes sensethen, that Saleh needed to take refuge for a while, to hide behind something. But since then Saleh has entered a new phase, challenging their relationship to vulnerability.
In 2021, Saleh made their acting breakthrough after being cast in the recurring role of Cal in the hit Netflix show Sex Education. The part has been praised for providing groundbreaking nonbinary representation in the media—a Black nonbinary character played by a Black nonbinary person. Acting has felt challenging for Saleh in a way that’s different from music.
There were clear demands to this role in particular: They had to do a number of sex scenes, and what could make you more vulnerable than that—literal nakedness? Saleh says they received a lot of guidance from the other cast members about how to navigate the situation and protect themself during the process.
And this increase in vulnerability can be seen in their music as well. Saleh describes the new album as their most vulnerable music yet: “ What has challenged me about I Should Call Them is that I’m being more accessible to people in a way that allows them some insight into how I move in relationships and my personality, flaws and all.”
This candid tone is clear in tracks like “coast,” whose lyrics include: “Blaming myself for my self-isolation / I swear my self-conscious keeps ratting me out / Making a mist of a good situation / I’m spinning in place ’til I foam at the mouth / She calls me crazy, I pull out the knife saying / She’s the new cause of my panic attacks /Licking my lips while she twisting the knife / Cause it almost feels good getting stabbed in the back.” We see the messiness of wanting, and there is a clear openness. Saleh is right: We see the intensity of the feeling. We see the flaws.
Now, Saleh says, “I feel like it’s important for me to be honest. I don’t think it’s even an artistic thing. But I can’t be told what to do. I can’t shut my mouth.”
That night at Manhattan’s Bowery Ballroom, Saleh sports a strong look. Their face is painted a bright shade of blue and the soft-spoken person I talked to earlier in the day is gone. Their performance is bold, energized, loud. It’s clear Saleh is going to make sure their message is heard.
From Mission’s Women of Today issue. Homepage image of Dua Saleh by Grant Spanier.
