Written by Grammy-nominated Malian singer-guitarist Fatoumata Diawara returns on 5th June with MASSA, her most ambitious album to date, produced by French pop icon -M- and released on NØ FØRMAT! on vinyl, CD and digital. A record that reaches deep into West African roots while embracing a bold commercial aesthetic, it arrives alongside a headline European tour that includes a landmark date at the London Jazz Festival in November — and a summer stadium run with Gorillaz.
There are artists who evolve incrementally, and there are artists who periodically throw open the windows and let the world in. Fatoumata Diawara has always belonged to the second category. With MASSA, she does it again — and with considerable force. Working in close collaboration with Mathieu Cheddid, known to French audiences as -M-, one of the country’s most inventive pop producers and a long-standing creative ally, Diawara has made a record that feels both deeply personal and expansively global. It is rooted unmistakably in Mali and in West Africa, but it has the confidence to travel.
The album’s themes are serious and recurring in Diawara’s work: motherhood, faith, memory, resilience, and the social pressures that shape — and too often constrain — lives lived under the weight of tradition. On the new single Sigui, released on 20th May ahead of the album, she returns to one of her most consistent preoccupations: the dynamics of polygamous families and the slow corrosion of relationships through hypocrisy, jealousy and betrayal. It is a subject she has addressed before, but never quite like this. The production here carries a blues-and-rock inflection that gives the material a rawness to match its emotional directness. There is a reason Fatoumata Diawara’s music connects across continents, and Sigui is a good illustration of why: the specificity of the subject doesn’t limit it. It opens it out.
MASSA is the work of an artist at a particular kind of peak — not in the sense of some final summit, but in the sense of someone who has absorbed a remarkable range of experience and is now working with complete authority. In the years since her Grammy-nominated breakthrough, Diawara has collaborated with Herbie Hancock, Damon Albarn, Disclosure and Roberto Fonseca, among many others. She shared a stage with Lauryn Hill as part of the Ms. Lauryn Hill & The Fugees Tour at Amsterdam’s Ziggo Dome. She has built a charity in Mali supporting children with albinism and disabilities, and this year made history by becoming the first Black woman to sign a signature guitar with Gibson Epiphone — a recognition not just of her musicianship but of her influence on younger generations of players. All of this feeds into MASSA, not as biographical decoration but as lived depth. You can hear it.
What strikes me most about this album is the balance Diawara and Cheddid maintain throughout. The pop aesthetic is genuine — this is not a roots record with pop gloss applied from the outside — but it never overwhelms the Malian musical identity that makes her work distinctive. The pentatonic foundation, the griotic vocal register, the Mandinka rhythmic sensibility: these remain central. Cheddid understands them, and understands how to let them breathe within a wider sonic frame. It is a genuinely collaborative production, and it shows.
The live context for MASSA could hardly be more varied — or more telling about Diawara’s reach. This summer, she joins Gorillaz for a series of major European stadium dates, including a performance at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium in London on 20th June. Her connection with Damon Albarn goes back to Africa Express and has deepened through multiple collaborative projects over more than a decade; when she performs Désolé with Gorillaz, it is not a guest slot but a genuine artistic relationship made visible. Later in the year, the focus shifts to the jazz world, with a headline date at the London Jazz Festival in November at the Roundhouse — a significant booking that positions MASSA firmly within the festival jazz circuit as well as the wider global music landscape.
Full tour dates, including all European festival and concert appearances through 2026, are available at fatoumatadiawara.com/en/tour/.
It is worth pausing on what Fatoumata Diawara represents at this moment in European jazz and global music. She is not a jazz musician in any narrow sense — her work crosses into pop, rock, blues, Afrobeat and much else — but she has been a fixture on the European jazz festival circuit for years, and her presence at events like the London Jazz Festival carries meaning. She brings audiences who might not otherwise find their way to a jazz festival. She models a kind of musical thinking — rooted, collaborative, politically engaged, technically uncompromising — that the jazz world at its best has always valued. And she does it without any apparent effort to seek approval from that world. She simply works, and the work speaks.
MASSA is released on 5th June on NØ FØRMAT!, available on vinyl, CD and digital. The single Sigui is out now.
Last modified: May 21, 2026
