New Mdou Moctar
I first heard this band's music while on a camping trip with my friends where everyone got insanely stoned and we just sat around listening to Afrique Victime in the middle of the woods. That album goes insanely hard and I can particularly recommend it for going into the woods and achieving a state of extremely altered consciousness. Or for regular consciousness...
They just released a new album, Tears of Injustice, that I've been checking out. It is an acoustic version of their previous album, Funeral for Justice, so it has a very different sound from the music I've previously enjoyed from them. But it is still really good!
Re: the titles of these albums - this band is from Niger and writes a ton of protest music. Definitely check out the album notes on the bandcamp page I linked above. The story of what happened here and why/how the acoustic version was recorded is pretty nuts:
In 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.