Ali Sethi’s debut album, Love Language, begins with a song you’re not allowed to hear. The delicate keys and candlelit croon of “O Balama (Censored Love Song)” are intermittently interrupted by squalls of radio-jamming static before being buried under a dystopian barrage—whirring helicopter blades, distant screams, bass that explodes like artillery. It’s a poignant opening that lays out the album’s stakes with cinematic clarity: a voice shaped by centuries of syncretic South Asian musical traditions, straining to be heard over the white noise of nationalism, identity politics and state-sanctioned erasure.
This isn’t just a metaphorical struggle. In May this year, following four days of military clashes between India and Pakistan, the Indian government ordered streaming platforms to stop hosting content originating from Pakistan. Sethi—a U.S. citizen who lives in New York, but was born and raised in Lahore—suddenly found himself cut off from his biggest market. His Instagram account was blocked in India and much of his catalog disappeared from major streaming platforms, including his 2022 breakthrough hit, “Pasoori.” Apparently, the song’s central message—of love as an antidote to the divisions imposed upon us—posed too much of a risk to “national security.”
Censorship is just one of the threats dramatized by “O Balama”’s martial cacophony. In Pakistan, Sethi’s queer identity has made him a target of the religious right. In 2023, in response to false rumors that he had married his partner, Pakistani-American painter Salman Toor, he was subjected to a wave of homophobic trolling, including calls for his execution. In the United States, Trump’s return to the White House has coincided with a surge in anti-immigrant rhetoric and Islamophobic hate crime. All over the world, it seems like the ways of being that Sethi champions—borderless, pluralistic, grounded in a sense of shared humanity—are on the retreat, fighting a desperate rearguard action against bigotry and intolerance.
On Love Language, Sethi goes on the counterattack, crafting effervescent, playfully subversive pop songs that don’t merely challenge the binaries that bind us, but dissolve them altogether. Punjabi folk collides with blown-out hyperpop; Hindustani classical ragas and flamenco guitar dance an intricate waltz; Sufi devotional meditations are draped in lo-fi, banjo-flecked Americana. East and West, the sacred and the sensual—it all blurs into one phantasmagorical fever dream.
On the Bollywood-meets-bossa-nova track “Hanera,” Sethi sings of forbidden love in innuendo-laced Punjabi as tabla flourishes ripple over club-ready bass and metronomic, four-to-the-floor percussion. The warp-speed tabla rhythms of raga-meets-reggaeton cut “Hymn 4 Him” swing in dizzying spirals; Sethi sings of waving “our flags in the enemy’s face,” conjuring images of whirling dervishes at a Pride march. Standout track “Lovely Bukhaar” hovers somewhere between campy striptease and sex-drunk meltdown. Sethi’s blown-out vocals—grainy with digital compression and feverish desire—duet with a heavily vocoded sarangi over finger-snap percussion as he sings of love as an illness, an obsession, an addiction so powerful that it overwhelms both body and mind.
Despite its weighty themes, Love Language never strays into polemic. These are still love songs, after all. But Sethi deploys the love song as a Trojan horse—embedding radical critiques of ethno-nationalism and heteronormativity in declarations of longing and pleasure. He draws not just from the best traditions of Western pop, but also the ghazals and Sufi poetry he was raised on. In these poetic forms, gender is often fluid—male poets pining for male murshids, lovers shifting shape mid-verse—and the lines between romantic love, spiritual devotion, and quiet rebellion are deliberately blurred.
Like the Sufi mystics before him, Sethi uses the language of desire—and the subtle shadings of his powerful, emotive voice—to gesture at subtextual undercurrents of resistance and solidarity. On the indie-folk charmer “Bridegroom,” he cosplays as a coy bride who claps back at those who question her to-be husband’s manhood. It’s a tongue-in-cheek celebration of queer love, and a winking rebuke to the homophobic troll campaign he endured a couple of years ago. “Rocket Launcher”—featuring Lahori musician Maanu—layers flute trills and autotuned yearning over a jittery drill beat as Sethi gently lampoons Punjabi hypermasculinity while also subverting stereotypical associations of Muslim men with lethal weaponry.
Elsewhere, the hyperpop cabaret of “Villain” reimagines the 1970s trope of the Bollywood vamp—glamorous, campy, and promiscuous, in contrast to the chaste heroine—as a queer antihero, cocking a licentious snook at the gatekeepers of love, identity, and morality. Scooped-out dhol rhythms and cheesy ’80s disco riffs lead into a crescendo of glitchy bleeps and jagged industrial synths as Sethi’s voice alternates between breathy whisper and kittenish croon.
Love Language loses a little steam in its final stretch, trading anarchic, liberatory joy for more sedate, formulaic fare. “Tere Sitam” is a technically accomplished ballad, but it lacks the exuberant inventiveness that makes Sethi’s music so thrilling. The folk-pop of “Kaava” sounds too indebted to the melancholic melodrama of sappy late-’90s Bollywood, despite Sethi’s attempts to update that sound for Berlin clubland.
Still, even in its quieter, less adventurous moments, Love Language never loses sight of its central proposition: that love—in its myriad forms—can be a site of resistance as much as retreat. In Sethi’s capable hands, romance becomes a radical act, gender a performance, and tradition a canvas to scribble all over. The result is a record that insists, tenderly and flamboyantly, on the right to love and be loved, across every kind of border.
