Amatssou

There's a convoluted back story to the ninth studio album by our favourite guitar-toting Touareg desert rockers. Tinariwen were originally meant to fly to the US to record in Nashville with country musicians and producer Daniel Lanois, whose credits range from U2 to Bob Dylan. The idea was to explore the separate but shared traditions of cowboys of the Old West and Touareg desert nomads singing songs of loss and longing around a campfire. In the event, lockdown meant Tinariwen couldn't fly and instead Lanois and his musicians planned to make the trip in the opposite direction and record on Tinariwen's home territory in the Sahara only for Plan B to be scuppered when the producer went down with COVID.

Eventually Amatssou was assembled long-distance, Tinariwen recording in a tent in the Algerian desert, the country musicians Fats Kaplin and Wes Corbett recording their parts in Nashville and Lanois adding hauntingly spacey production from his home studio in Los Angeles. Logic says it shouldn't work – and yet the mix of banjos, fiddles and soaring pedal steel with Tinariwen's snaking guitar lines and hypnotic desert grooves sounds both fitting and magnificent with ‘Arajghiyine’ and ‘Jayche Atarak’ in particular among the greatest tracks they've ever recorded.