The music is delicate: Ahmed’s singing voice is bassy and warm, and soft acoustic instruments adorn the understated production. When Smoke Rises deftly translates Ahmed’s poetry to melody without blunting the truth of the narratives at its core. With subject matter like a still-recent death, the journey from poetry to pop music can be treacherous the medium necessarily requires Ahmed to polish his stories until they’re glossy enough for radio play and A&R meetings. But the topics that marked his poetry as a young teen-violence, death, grief-have remained constant in his artistic output, and they stay central on When Smoke Rises, named in honor of Smoke Dawg, a fellow Halal Gang member who was murdered in 2018. These days, he is tight with Drake and FKA twigs he’s narrated a Valentino ad and written songs for Usher and Camila Cabello. Ahmed, a founding member of rap collective Halal Gang, used to be known as Mustafa the Poet, having gained recognition for his earnest spoken-word verse at just 12 years old. When Smoke Rises is Mustafa Ahmed’s first full-length album as a solo artist, but it’s just the latest volume in his growing library of dispatches from Toronto’s Regent Park neighborhood.

Mustafa ahmed