LOS ANGELES, CA- When Azam Ali released “To Pieces”, the opening single from her forthcoming Synesthesia, she asked us to witness a world at the brink. The song crackles with dark tension, chirping synths, echoing percussions, and her voice oscillating between fragility and feral power. In her own words, she conceived it as “a vision of a primal nightscape, wilderness beneath a blood-red moon, a ritual bonfire, and a restless spirit straining against its confines to break free.”
The lyrics plunge us into stark imagery:
“I fall to pieces / In the throat of the night / You devour my pieces / At the horizon line.”
“There’s a blood moon like an eye in the sky / A scar of heaven where longing goes to love / … there will be no flowers for acres of your eyes.”
These lines evoke not just heartbreak but a cosmic void. The “devouring” of pieces suggests violence, consumption, and surrender. But Ali’s framing of To Pieces isn’t a dirge. She insists it is not fragmentation, but an invocation, that “within the very design of unraveling lies the pattern through which we can become whole.”
Musically, the track shimmers in that liminal space between organic and otherworldly. Bones of percussion, synth drones that cry like human voices, and her haunting voice that echoes in the mix. Ali, as sole composer, producer, and performer, proves herself a master painter of atmospheres, sculpting what feels like an altar in sonic form.
Yet one cannot purely admire the sonic architecture without acknowledging what gives To Pieces extra resonance: Azam Ali’s unflinching presence in the world. Over recent months, she has used her social media platforms to issue urgent calls for a ceasefire and an end to the genocide in Gaza, dedicating “my social media platforms to advocating for a ceasefire” and speaking openly against indiscriminate self-defense tactics that target civilians In one post she declared: “In my entire career, I have never witnessed such brutality, indiscriminate and unnecessary force against an unarmed, starving civilian.” Her public statements are not peripheral — they are woven into the very fabric of her music, giving To Pieces both aesthetic form and moral urgency.
It’s here that the brilliance of To Pieces emerges: it is a personal elegy and a political howl held in one frame. The human and elemental betrayal she sings of mirrors the betrayals of war, displacement, and forced erasure. When she rages against nature’s own indiscriminate fury, that metaphor extends to systems of violence that spare no one. The song’s ritual fire becomes both an act of mourning and a call to a complete or fundamental change from one state into another.
As the first glimpse into Synesthesia, the song sets the emotional tone for what promises to be an album steeped in contrast: darkness and light, ruin and regeneration, voice and silence. I’d venture to guess that this album will be her declaration… her claim… as an artist whose politics aren’t beside her music. They are intertwined. They are in it.
For listeners navigating these tumultuous and often overbearing times, To Pieces offers a space of reflection. It does not shy away from suffering, but insists that from the ashes of devastation, we may find the map to repair. And given how Azam has refused to stay quiet, to separate art from witness, the song becomes a kind of incantation: to stay awake, to feel the brokenness, and to hold that fracture as living ground.
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