Copenhagen’s AySay has always existed in the in-between—between languages, between traditions, between emotional states that don’t neatly resolve. On their third studio album, Mal, out March 27 via V2 Records, that space becomes the entire point.
Led by Danish/Kurdish artist Luna Ersahin, the group continues to trace a path through Anatolian folk and Nordic pop, but here the fusion feels deeper, more lived-in. Sung across Turkish, Kurdish, and Danish, Mal moves like a search, circling questions of identity, belonging, and what it actually means to call somewhere home.
The title itself holds that tension. “Mal” means home in Kurdish, but the album doesn’t treat home as something fixed or easily claimed. Instead, it unfolds as a process—something shaped through memory, displacement, love, and resistance. Ersahin’s songwriting leans into that ambiguity, holding hope and hopelessness in the same breath without forcing either to win out.
Sonically, the record drifts between hypnotic and grounded. There are driving guitars and trance-like rhythms that echo Anatolian rock traditions, but they’re refracted through a colder, more spacious Nordic lens. You can hear traces of artists like Barış Manço and Selda Bağcan in the melodic phrasing, while the band’s broader sensibility pulls toward something more contemporary and fluid—less revivalist, more reimagined.
At the center of it all is Ersahin’s voice, both intimate and declarative. Her words carry the weight of lived experience—queerness, cultural hybridity, political awareness, and the quiet defiance of simply existing on your own terms. In her own words, the album reflects a period of searching: learning what it means to be Kurdish without language, navigating visibility and backlash, processing heartbreak, and holding on to softness in a world that often demands hardness.
The focus track, “Den om en mand (Haline Bak),” captures that balance well. Switching between Danish and Turkish, it tells a familiar story—a man who promises everything and disappears when it matters—but does so with a kind of knowing sarcasm. It’s sharp without being bitter, observational without losing its emotional core.
Across Mal, AySay continues to build a musical language that resists borders—geographical, cultural, or otherwise. The result is something fluid and quietly powerful: a record that doesn’t try to resolve identity, but instead sits with it, lets it breathe, and in doing so, makes space for something honest to emerge.
Check out AySay’s new record here
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