Mdou Moctar Shares ‘Funeral for Justice (Injustice Version)’

On February 28, Mdou Moctar will release Tears of Injustice, the acoustic version of Funeral for Justice.

Today, listen to “Funeral for Justice (Injustice Version).” The song – the title track of ‘Funeral for Justice’ and something of a thematic lynchpin for the band’s last year of work – has been dramatically reshaped for ‘Tears.’ The original’s tight arrangement and full-blast guitar riff have been set aside in favour of an arrangement that feels loose, sprawling, and improvisational.

Next week, Mdou Moctar will begin a North American tour. Due to delays in the visa process, the guitarist will now perform solo sets in Toronto, Ottawa, and Montreal. Following those shows, Mdou will rejoin the band – Mikey Coltun, Souleymane Ibrahim, Ahmoudou Madassane – to tour the US in a stripped-down acoustic format.

Tears of Injustice owes its existence to a national catastrophe. In July of 2023, Mdou Moctar was on tour in the United States when the president of Niger was deposed in a coup. Moctar, Ahmoudou Madassane, and Souleymane Ibrahim unable to return home to their families. They decided to seize the opportunity to record a companion to Funeral for Justice, one that reflected the newer and graver circumstances at home. Two days after the tour wrapped, the quartet began tracking Tears of Injustice at Brooklyn’s Bunker Studio with engineer Seth Manchester.

They chose to track Tears sitting together in one room, keeping the session loose, stripped down, and spontaneous. After a month, the band was able to return home to Niger and, when they did, bassist and producer Mikey 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.

On Funeral for Justice, anger at the plight of Niger and the Tuareg people is plainly expressed in the music’s volume and velocity. On Tears, the songs retain that weight sans amplification. They are steeped in sadness, conveying the grief of a nation locked into a constant churn of poverty, colonial exploitation, and political upheaval. It is Tuareg protest music in raw and essential form.