Dua Saleh: The genre-bending rising star

If you’re in any danger of backtracking into a situationship, don’t listen to Dua Saleh’s music. By any means necessary, steer clear of their single, ‘want’, because we fear its addictive beats mask the hypnotic repetition in their lyrics, which compel you to confront your desires (“I know I probably shouldn’t / but I think I want, want, want to”). You’ve been warned.

You might recognise Dua as Sex Education’s Cal Bowmen, but if you haven’t delved into their music yet, you’re missing out big time on tracks charged enough to lead you back to your ex. The Sudanese-American artist knows no bounds: a poet, activist, musician and performer melding their experiences into genre-blurring tracks that redefine what it means to create. With a distinctly real voice that treads terrains of love, identity and resilience, Dua’s artistry is a revelry of authenticity and vulnerability.

Born in Kassala, Sudan, to a family with Tunjur heritage, Dua’s childhood was marked by upheaval. When they were just five, Dua fled the Sudanese Civil War with their family to the American Midwest, settling in Saint Paul, Minnesota. Lost with English immersion, Dua’s mother tongue was actually originally Arabic—and the language continues to permeate much of their music today. Raised in a Muslim household, the actor and musician had a turbulent relationship with tradition, often feeling at odds with societal expectations of what a Muslim should embody.

Dua found their voice in poetry at an early age, nourished by their mother’s scripture readings and later redefined through spoken-word performances. The latter garnered hundreds of thousands of views through the platform Button Poetry, known for their viral videos of slam poetry performances. It was around this time that Dua also became deeply entrenched in activism in their community, which was marked by systemic injustice. In high school, they led a walkout against the school-to-prison pipeline, galvanised by an awareness beyond their years of the challenges faced by marginalised people in their neighbourhood. This consciousness shapes their work to this day, with Dua frequently addressing social themes in their music in the midst of their reflections on identity, love and resistance. 

Their debut EP, Nūr, released in January 2019 by Against Giants, met massive acclaim, followed by the release of their second EP, Rosetta, in 2020 and CROSSOVER in 2021 – together, they’ve reached over 94 million streams to date. Their forthcoming album, I SHOULD CALL THEM, was only just released in October of 2024. The album is the first body of work that Dua has dropped since their contribution as a co-writer for Travis Scott’s UTOPIA track ‘MY EYES’. It’s a convergence of sounds—electronic indie-pop courting R&B—and the album is an introspective venture into Dua’s grasp of love’s dualities: joy and heartbreak, strength and vulnerability. It’s distinctly shaped by an overarching tone of environmental anxieties. An exciting slew of collaborations with artists like Gallant, serpentwithfeet, and Sid Sriram give it that much more versatility.

Humming with imagery and riddled in metaphors, Dua’s lyrics demonstrate an acute awareness of language’s power. Their love for poetry has clearly endured, saturating each track with elegiac meaning. Bars that shouldn’t exist together somehow do; on their track ‘Pretty Kitty’, the line “Shorty would you join me for one night / if you call me up then imma slide” meets flesh and narrative in tandem with “Let me roll this solemn sin / winter rolls into the wind / bitter broken once again.”

Their choice to incorporate Arabic in tracks like ‘smut’ exemplifies a desire to connect with their heritage while queering the narratives; it’s a realm of art that the language seldom crosses, estranged from cultural expectations. But it’s this intersectionality that enriches their music, casually challenging norms and provoking thought. While it may constitute a statement of some kind, rendering Dua an activist, it’s done effortlessly as an afterthought, just two vital elements of their identity existing in one space as they should.

For Dua, authentic existence is inevitably (many would say, sadly) a radical statement. Through their portrayal of Cal Bowman in Netflix’s Sex Education, a character that mirrors their real selves in gender agnosticism, Dua brought a struggle to the screen that is hardly ever represented. With this role, Dua opened avenues for crucial discussions around gender—creating visibility, but even more essentially, an intimate understanding of their experiences. Particularly for the SWANA region, where such topics are suppressed to oblivion, Dua’s embodiment of this role was a revolutionary win.

It’s hard to overstate the extent to which gender is fraught with misunderstanding and discrimination globally. Yet Dua approaches this reality with a sense of irreverence and humour that makes their music and public persona that much more human. With their lyrical tracings of love, coming to know themselves, all while refusing to shirk the roots that may reject them, Dua creates a phenomenally moving listening experience that prompts listeners to question their biases. More importantly, for those who can relate to Dua’s position—be it in religion, orientation, gender or matters of the heart—the artist creates a sense of community for those on the quest for belonging and being seen.

Dua is a vital presence among the Dazed 100. Their works urge us to fearlessly explore identity, love and resistance, not as a deliberate push or an advocation on their end, but just by the simple act of their creating art that is true to them.