Tinariwen, a Grammy award-winning group of Tuareg musicians from the Saharan Desert in Northern Mali, has just announced a new record called Elwan, or “The Elephants”. The album, planned to drop on February 10th, would be the band’s 7th record, following a series of highly successful and critically acclaimed records.

Although the album comes next year, you can now watch a dazzling animated video for the track “Tenere Taqqal.” The word Ténéré means empty land or desert in Tamashek. The clip, directed by Axel Digoix, vividly depicts the contrast between the desert’s lack of hospitality and the love its inhabitants feel towards it, the Tuareg spiritual world and the tenacity this ethnic group needs to survive and keep moving forward, upstream.

In recent years, Tinariwen’s homeland has been transformed into a conflict zone. While the songs on the new record evoke those cherished deserts of home, they were recorded a long way away in two distinctive bursts.

In 2014 the band stopped at Rancho de la Luna studios in the desert of California’s Joshua Tree National Park.  While location proved particularly propitious in terms of creativity, the human climate was just as favorable, as musicians dropped by to add their own touch. Guitarist Matt Sweeny (Johnny Cash, Bonnie Prince Billy and Cat Power), Kurt Vile, musician Alan Johannes, who produced Queens of the Stone Age, a band with whom Mark Lanegan, the other guest has been a singer. All of it honed by engineer Andrew Schepps, who has worked with the Red Hot Chilli Peppers, Johny Cash, and Jay Z. Two years later in M’Hamid El Ghizlane, an oasis in southern Morocco, near the Algerian frontier, the band set up their tents to record, accompanied by the local musical youth and a Gangaoutfit (a group of Berber ‘gnawa’ trance musicians).

In American cinema, a road movie always unfolds the same way. Characters travel in search of some truth or revelation. But they always end up reconnecting with their own past. Of course, it’s an impossible return, because that past has been erased. It’s the same for this record, so musically powerful and yet poignant: every song evokes a land that can no longer be found, with all that this implies in terms of emotional range, from nostalgia for a joyous past to the tragic recent loss of a territory, and of the dream that it nourished.

Check out the album cover and the tracklist for Elwan below.

Elwan Tracklist
1. Tiwàyyen
2. Sastanàqqàm
3. Nizzagh Ijbal
4. Hayati
5. Ittus
6. Ténéré Tàqqàl
7. Imidiwàn N-Àkall-In
8. Talyat
9. Assàwt
10. Arhegh Ad Annàgh
11. Nànnuflày
12. Intro Flute Fog Edaghan
13. Fog Edaghàn