In the early months of 2020, Nabihah Iqbal’s studio was burgled. All her work was lost, including her long-awaited album. Already suffering from a broken hand and a severe case of burnout, she felt helpless. While the forensic police looked for fingerprints in her studio, she received a call. It was her grandmother; her grandfather had suffered a brain haemorrhage. Nabihah got on a plane to Karachi, Pakistan the next day.

As the Covid-19 pandemic surged, Nabihah spent the global lockdown finding resilience amidst the turmoil. “Going to Pakistan turned into a blessing in disguise,” she says. “It affected my perspective on music. At the time, being forcefully removed from the whole scenario of the burglary felt frustrating, but it was the best thing that could have happened.” Nabihah spent those months remembering why she made music in the first place. She went back to basics and bought an acoustic guitar and a harmonium. Alongside a loop pedal and voice notes, she spent the next two years crafting her album, ‘Dreamer’, a high-water mark for the London-born artist.

“For the first time ever, I’ve made music where I’ve been more patient with it,” she says. “Normally, when you’re an electronic music producer, you go into the studio, switch your computer on and start working on Ableton or Logic and then build up from that. Whereas, I decided not to go near all that for ages, and I was also forced into this approach in a way, because of the studio burglary and then being in Pakistan, away from all my equipment. Instead, I had to let the ideas develop in my head.”

Using broader concepts, ‘Dreamer’ is “more introspective, because it's about things that I’ve been through over the last few years,” she says. The album is an intimate journey through snapshots and memories of Nabihah’s life. Exploring personal identity and grief through the soft-focus lens of melancholy, the album is not one specific sound. Her left-field lo-fi aesthetic twirls itself throughout as she manages to skate between tracks without ever sounding disjointed. Apart from four of the songs which have live drums on them, Nabihah wrote, recorded and produced the album herself. Incorporating the harmonium and sitar in her music for the first time, instruments reflective of her Pakistani heritage, it’s Nabihah’s rawest and most personal work yet.

Opener “In Light” acts as a palette cleanser, demanding the listener's attention with its focus on atmospherics. With a harmonium sound laden with spacey effects, the track signals the album's intention: to soothe the listener in moments they feel lost or just can’t remember what they seek. Elements of shoegaze weave themselves into “Dreamer” and “This World Couldn’t See Us”, the latter of which finds Nabihah’s voice shimmering above an infectious melodic beat. With its skittish drum rolls, ‘Sunflower’ luxuriates in its capacity for pleasure, fit for both an intimate moment or bleeding out of a club’s sound system. “Gentle Heart” possesses ‘80s synth-heavy beats which bounce with drunken bravado, the friendliest track on the album for the dance floor while “Sky River” possesses a wobbly baseline which carries it towards a euphoric build-up.