“The night,” Arooj Aftab confesses, “is my biggest source of inspiration.” By trial or intuition she’s come to understand that these still moments of cover uniquely enable healing, desire, shelter, love—each essential elements of life and living, of intimate relation to one another. Perhaps because its darkness loosens inhibitions or invites new ways of being, enticing all to leave the day as honestly as they entered it, night welcomes play and searching. So too does Aftab’s voice, its reach and intensity complimenting the sun’s departure.

Night Reign (Verve, 2024) is a perfumed, public garden of renewal, peaking the senses with each

composition, each turn of phrase, each modulation. Stepping away from, though never forgetting, the grief and loss that animated her Grammy Award-winning album Vulture Prince (Verve/New Amsterdam, 2021), Aftab appears here with original music and in yet another form: as bard of everyday possibility, quietude, and life-altering romance.