ZAINAB announces debut EP, ‘Canal View’, on Ninja Tune’s Technicolor
The third single, ‘Banglahore’, is out now
New York City-based DJ and producer ZAINAB has announced her debut EP, ‘Canal View’, arriving 14th August via Ninja Tune’s Technicolour imprint.
The announcement coincides the release of the EP’s third single, ‘Banglahore’, featuring Surya Sun. You can listen to the track below.
“Banglahore is a mix of ‘Bangladesh’ and ‘Lahore’, the two places Surya Sen and I are from,” ZAINAB shared. “The title came from his lyrics, and immediately I thought: ‘that’s the name of the track’. To me, it represents collaboration between Bangladesh and Pakistan.
“There’s a difficult history there, and a lot of animosity, so the song is symbolic in that way too,” she continued. “It’s about saying: we can get along. I love my Bangladeshi brothers and sisters, and vice versa.”
The EP’s title references the neighbourhood where ZAINAB lived as a child, while tracks including previous single ‘Jadoo’ feature lyrics written and sung in Urdu, a presence the artist says is “severely lacking in the dance music scene”, despite the language being spoken by an estimated 246 million people globally.
“I see the EP as an amalgamation of Lahore and New York: looking back and forth between both places and asking what those sounds become when they come together,” ZAINAB shared. "It symbolises a view from a specific place: my perspective as someone who grew up at the edge of town, looking out at the world and being influenced by so many different things. In a sense, the EP is my perspective on all the music I grew up consuming in Lahore, and then later as an immigrant in New York.”
‘Canal View’ is out next month via Technicolour. Listen to ‘Banglahore’ below.
