The most striking thing about Dua Saleh’s new tracks isn’t the Bon Iver feature. It’s the decision to keep Justin Vernon’s improvised hook intact.
For an artist known for shaping identity through precision, letting a moment stay unpolished shifts the energy immediately.
“Flood” and “Glow”, released 3rd February 2026, feel closer to fragments caught mid-process than carefully staged singles.
Vernon’s voice cracks open “Flood” with a hook he freestyled in the session. Not polished later. Not rewritten. Just caught.
The chorus works as a line-by-line exchange – Vernon sings, Saleh completes the thought, back and forth, neither voice leading. Their voices blend with an ethereal quality, soothing yet haunting.
When Saleh moves into verse, grief becomes something you survive inside rather than escape from: “Silent blessings / You’ve emerged / Oh but this grief inside me growling.”
The flood isn’t performing as metaphor. It’s climate-related flooding Saleh experienced while living in Cardiff.
‘Flood’ turns personal climate trauma into something physical, while ‘Glow’ circles the tension between desire and control without letting either side win.
Billy Lemos, Vernon, Ryan Olson and Sen 09 keep the production moving – mid-tempo, almost upbeat – whilst Saleh’s subdued delivery creates a drifting, reflective quality.
The beat stays steady as atmospheric layers build, giving Vernon’s falsetto the feeling of a horizon line.
Saleh’s verses work as quiet elegy, mourning what’s been lost whilst reaching for rebirth.
Guitar strums anchor “Glow” whilst Vernon’s atmospheric touches build around them, creating a soulful warmth that draws you close.
Vernon opens with distance already embedded before Saleh collapses the gap entirely: “If I don’t let you go / I’ll make you close, I’ll take you home.”
The lyric names what it’s doing whilst doing it. Desire and control, tangled past separation.
There’s ketamine in the verse, bodies in parks, the confession that someone wanted them badly enough to destabilise footing.
Psymun, Billy Lemos and Phil Simmonds keep the production hovering between indie-club pulse and late-night confession, letting rhythm carry tension.
The hook circles desire without resolving it, describing closeness whilst quietly questioning ownership.
Nothing here feels fully finished.
These sessions in Minneapolis unfolded quickly, shaped by war in Sudan, AI encroaching on artistic territory, Saleh questioning where home lives when accent starts to fade.
Six tracks in three hours. The kind of output that only happens when defences drop. Vernon kept showing up afterward, retracking vocals, shaping arrangements.
That sustained attention is the real feature. Vernon doesn’t arrive like a feature. He stays like someone who forgot to leave.
The water never resolves into calm. The glow never turns comforting. If these early glimpses of Of Earth & Wires, due 15th May via Ghostly International, hold their shape, Saleh isn’t attempting resolution.
Just learning how to stay present whilst everything shifts. The record title promises infrastructure and organic matter in tension, and these tracks suggest an artist willing to let the structure remain unfinished at the edges. Not safe. Not settled. Learning to float.
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