Dua Saleh Maps the Friction Between Biology and Technology on Second Album

The second Dua Saleh album arrives at a moment already thick with conversations about planetary decline and machine intelligence. Of Earth & Wires doesn’t simply reference those threads. It embeds them directly into the architecture of the songs, where acoustic gestures get swallowed by synthetic noise and then, sometimes, reemerge.

Opener “5 Days” lays out the logic immediately. What starts as string plucks and a clean vocal line gradually dissolves into digitized percussion and vocoder howls. The transition is slow enough to feel almost natural, which is precisely the point. Saleh treats the boundary between organic sound and digital processing as a permeable membrane rather than a hard split.

The album moves through several distinct modes after that. “B r e a t h e” floats on a rhythm that recalls Slow Rush-era Tame Impala, all bubbling percussion and organ-like synths. “Cállate” pushes into skittering drum and bass territory, while “Firestorm” reaches back toward the butter-smooth R&B of two decades ago. The range is broad but never scattered. Each stylistic turn feels tethered to the record’s central preoccupation.

Bon Iver appears on multiple tracks, though anyone expecting straightforward indie folk duets will need to recalibrate. “Keep Away” opens so woozy and submerged that the feature credit almost seems like a misprint until that voice cuts through, clean and nearly gospel against the murky low end underneath. The contrast works because neither element tries to dominate the other.

Closer “ALL IS LOVE” is where the two strands of the album fully converge. The track swells and sighs, experimental in construction but oddly hymnal in feeling. It lands as a declaration of hope that doesn’t ignore the wreckage around it. Saleh has made a record that stares directly at a damaged present and still finds room for something that sounds like belief.