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Musician and producer Abdullah Siddiqui has announced his fifth studio album, Bad Music, confirming its release date alongside a deeply personal note shared on Instagram. The record arrives on January 16, with Siddiqui describing it as the product of prolonged emotional reckoning, written in the shadow of trauma and its aftermath.

“I’ve been sitting on this album for a long time,” Siddiqui wrote, framing Bad Music as a body of work born out of what he calls “body-breaking, nervous-system-resetting trauma” — experiences he did not initially have the language to process. Some songs, he explains, were written immediately after that rupture, while others emerged later, once the shock had hardened into something “darker, snarkier, and more jaded”.

The result, Siddiqui says, is an album that is “dark but not dramatic”. Rather than attempting to sonically recreate devastation itself, Bad Music documents the messy, uncomfortable purging that followed — “the underbaked catharsis” of trying to make pain meaningful before it had settled.

In hindsight, he acknowledges that the process was damaging. “I mined my pain violently when I was at my most fragile,” he wrote, describing how the act of writing shifted from processing to self-punishment.

Across the album, Siddiqui interrogates anxiety-warped relationships, ritualised coping mechanisms, inherited emotional patterns, and the unsettling intimacy of surviving something you don’t fully remember. The tone oscillates between sincerity, darkness, humour, and sharp self-awareness — always, he notes, intentionally uncomfortable. “Eventually, I had to look at myself and admit that I wasn’t processing anymore. I was self-flagellating,” he concluded. “And that writing these songs had been bad for me.”

The album’s title reflects that realisation head-on. “So, my fifth album is called Bad Music,” Siddiqui announced plainly.

In the lead-up to the album, Siddiqui has already released several tracks over the past month, giving listeners an evolving glimpse into its emotional terrain. These include ‘I Don’t Want To Listen To Your Bad Music’, ‘Humanise’, ‘Mother!’, and his most recent single, ‘Out Of Context’.

Bad Music comprises 10 tracks in total. Alongside the songs already out, fans can expect ‘Circle Back’, ‘Sudoku at a Funeral’, ‘Have Me’, ‘Spike’, ‘Occam’s Razor’, and ‘Father’ — titles that hint at the album’s mix of intimacy, irony, and introspection.

With its release date now locked in, Bad Music positions itself as one of Siddiqui’s most self-critical and emotionally exposed projects yet.