The tone is foreboding and the album almost creeps up on you, but Moosa Saleem’s fifth album starts off strong. The album is titled aptly. Paranoia will make you feel paranoid and itch all the right spots in a manner that is cathartic.
Saleem’s music is a rare combination of strength and vulnerability, every note crisp and clear. Paranoia is not just an album, it is an insight into the artist’s mind, where he is brave enough to battle the anxieties and the shadows within.
Saleem belongs to Kashmir’s Srinagar and his work is known for his soundscapes. This is his first album under this alias with lyrics, and they are beautiful ones at that.
The album has been released under an independent German label, Unique Vibes, and Saleem has collaborated with Norwegian, Danish and Mexican artists to produce it.
The production choices are minimal and striking – minimal and ambient and packed with cinematic tension and electronic flair. You can hear tension, quiet desperation in his voice, fear beneath the softness. There is something hauntingly beautiful about the way Saleem captures emotion. He doesn’t just sing about paranoia, he invites you into it.
The opening track, Here For Me, sets the tone with eerie floating textures and sparse beats, making you feel like you’re in a ghostly awful cerebral area being watched with no place left to run. The song is immersive, it almost also makes you feel like spiralling into the darkest of your head is the right way to exist (although it definitely isn’t).
Torture, the second song, reigns along the same line, with the ghosts of your own head engulfing your spirit, diving into personal turmoil with unflinching honesty. The drop in the song almost makes you believe that you are being suffocated instead of released and that in itself is a testament to Saleem’s talent. It reminds you of how fragile the mind can be when it is carrying too much.
In Spiral, he has collaborated with Rubayne and track acts as a sequel to Here For Me, inducing the same desperate claustrophobic feeling, except to the listener with a tad bit of an arrangement stylistically: the song seems to be as much about sound as the space between sounds: a poignant exploration of the descending of the bell jar- just like Plath’s book, when she uses the phrase “The floor seemed wonderfully solid and it was comforting to know that I had fallen and could fall no further”.
Chloroform with Kaphy and SOR and Run For Cover with Henri Werner sound like songs that demand sweet release, both brooding but danceable tracks blending indie disco with darker electronic undertones – the songs are, dare one say considering the mood of the album, fun. It’ll make you want to sway and move around, it’ll make you want to seek comfort with other people if you are sad and seek togetherness, and perhaps that is where the redemption occurs.
What makes Paranoia so compelling is Saleem’s fearlessness to confront the rawest and dirtiest of emotions. All human beings have spiralled in their thoughts, but only a few can revel in them and understand them enough to actually create art. Darkness and doubt perpetuate Moosa Saleem’s songs but listening to the album does make you realise that you will be okay. Or even if you aren’t, you definitely won’t be alone.
Toxic World, with Mandrazo is another shot thrown at the darkness of the world whilst Knew About You with Kaphy attempts to deliver a form of romantic reprieve, but even here there is a lingering sense of unease between the illusion of warmth. It is a reminder that love is not enough and primarily is what we make of it, generally existing under the shadow of doubt. This duality is where Saleem shines, his albums have twists and turns like people living their lives often do.
ZOO with CREME opens on a cheerier note, sort of sparking the feeling of being alive , quite possibly a nudge in the direction that if you’re lonely, you’re not always alone and that in the grander scheme of things love is all around us even if it is not about us and perhaps that is what we should appreciate.
The closing track It Goes with Rubayne and Siddharth Basrur also definitely sounds more hopeful. It is a soft rosy end to an otherwise emotionally turbulent album. The song doesn’t offer a resolution, but it does offer relief and perhaps that is all we really want to feel when we consume art. To let go. It is in these moments that his storytelling ability shines the brightest, bringing in a sort of reflective ending.
With Paranoia, Saleem dauntlessly uses his guitar in almost every track weaving them seamlessly with distorted synths and powerful rhythms. The result is an amalgamation of gritty, grungy rock textures with electronic intensity capturing the tension between reality and delusion, euphoria and dread.
The entire album feels like a conversation that you have with yourself at 2 in the morning when your chest is tight and your thoughts are loud, your worst fears intruding on every rational thought you have. It is emotionally immersive, sometimes overwhelmingly so, but that is what makes it unforgettable.
What struck me the most, is how intimate the production feels. It is stripped down where it needs to be, almost minimalist, like it knows that the words are heavy enough on their own. In terms of the sound, it mimics anxiety, the creepy rising feeling that takes over you when you realise they are spinning faster than you can contain them. It’s intentional, vulnerable and devastatingly real. Saleem hasn’t just made music, he has made something for everyone who feels like they’ve lived in their head for too long. Paranoia is an artistic triumph, an album that speaks to the fractured broken parts of ourselves searching for meaning in a world that feels disturbingly out of synch. The album stands out as a bold, brave and beautiful dive into the human condition.
