Tinariwen

Tinariwen are a Grammy-winning Tuareg collective from the Sahara — the borderlands between northern Mali and southern Algeria — who have been playing desert blues since 1979 and released their tenth album, Hoggar, in March 2026. The name is the plural of the Tamasheq word ténéré, "desert"; before they had a name of their own, people called them Kel Tinariwen, the people of the deserts. Founder Ibrahim Ag Alhabib was four years old when his father, a Tuareg rebel, was executed during a 1963 uprising in Mali. He built his first guitar out of an oil can, a stick and a bicycle brake wire after watching a cowboy play one in a western film, and acquired a real acoustic in 1979 — the year he began playing weddings and parties with Alhassane Ag Touhami and the brothers Inteyeden and Liya Ag Ablil. In 1980 Muammar Gaddafi invited young Tuareg men living in Libya to take military training; they went, served nine months, and came out of the camps as a loose collective writing about exile and Tuareg life. Those songs travelled the Sahara on cassette for years before an outside audience heard one. The Radio Tisdas Sessions, released in 2001, was the record that opened the door, and Tassili took Best World Music Album at the 2012 Grammys — one of three nominations. Ag Alhabib, Ag Touhami and Abdallah Ag Alhousseyni are all still in the band; the line-up around them keeps changing, because Tinariwen is a collective rather than a fixed five-piece. Hoggar came out on 13 March 2026 on the band's own Wedge label, after members were displaced from northern Mali into Algeria by the conflict there. It was cut in Tamanrasset — the southern Algerian town where Ag Alhabib lived as a boy in exile — at Aboogie, the studio of Iyad "Sadam" Moussa Ben Abderahmane of Imarhan. "Hoggar was a beautiful experience for me. It's the first time we recorded an album in Tamanrasset," Ag Alhousseyni told OkayAfrica in March 2026. Producer Patrick Votan built the record around several generations of the collective at once: Liya Ag Ablil plays on a Tinariwen album for the first time in more than twenty years, the Sudanese singer Sulafa Elyas sings on the first single "Sagherat Assani" — a tribute to the late Mohammed "Japonais" Ag Itlale — and José González guests on "Imidiwan Takyadam".