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Ali Sethi’s long-awaited studio album Love Language is set to drop on August 1, but as with everything the Lahore-born crooner does, it’s not as simple as a mere album launch.

Announced quietly on Instagram, the ‘Pasoori’ hitmaker captioned the album’s cover reveal with a subtle promise, “A ragamala rendezvous. I made it for me and you.” Alongside the poetic invitation were three striking images — Sethi cloaked in vivid reds, from glossy leather gloves and a cut-work top to a bedazzled headpiece. It was as if he were not just releasing an album but inviting fans into a world.

But what is an album in 2025? In a follow-up post a day later, Sethi seemed to be musing on that very question. “I am making an album,” he wrote, “but as usual, I am thinking of other words and other worlds.”

Accompanying this post were screenshots of Wikipedia definitions for “album”, “cabaret”, and “mehfil” — three forms that, according to Sethi’s handwritten notes, deeply influenced his imagination growing up.

Rather than narrowing his project to the contemporary understanding of an “album” — a playlist, a streaming drop, a product of polished PR cycles — he seems to be expanding it into something more tactile, ritualistic, even spell-like.

“Albums were things that arrived from the West,” he noted — artefacts from America, England, Europe that brought with them a sort of refrigerated coolness. They were distant, glossy, and imported. But cabaret? That was messy and dangerous, associated with forbidden pleasures and cinematic decadence.

“Anything banned in Pakistan was TWINKLY and attractive,” he wrote. “I had so much nostalgia for it precisely because I hadn’t experienced it firsthand.”

Then, there were mehfils — deeply rooted in his Lahori upbringing, yet no less exciting. Performed on carpets, Sethi described them as “bourgeois, respectable, and semi-religious,” but even here, emotion overflowed. “A grandmother went into an epileptic trance,” he recalled. “Someone jumped up and threw all their cash at the singer…while someone else started sobbing and had to be carried away.”

What linked all three forms for Sethi, the Western album, the risqué cabaret, and the desi mehfil, is what he called a “shamanic function.” They are all vessels of release, transformation, and communion.

“An essential flight or cleanse,” he wrote, “as native to our being, and as necessary for society to exist as any of the religiously prescribed rituals.”

In claiming these traditions, both foreign and local, inherited and imagined, Sethi seems ready to bridge the gap between spectacle and devotional expression with Love Language.

His upcoming “album” has a track list of 16 songs, but it may very well feel more like a séance or an ecstatic cry in the dark. Here are the songs he has listed: ‘O Balama (Censored Love Song)’, ‘Hanera’, ‘Rocket Launcher [ft Maanu]’, ‘Nursery Rhyme (Interlude)’, ‘Lovely Bukhaar’, ‘Jhatka in Jaunpuri (Interlude)’, ‘Hymn 4 Him (Ghoomray)’, ‘Villain’, ‘Bridegroom’, ‘Jadugarni’, ‘Kaava’, ‘Horizon’, ‘Subho Shaam [ft Natania]’, ‘Escape from Jhaptaal’, ‘Tera Sitam’, and ‘Maya’.

Two of the tracks, ‘Rocket Launcher’ and ‘Lovely Bukhaar’ are already out.