Imarhan

Tamanrasset

Imarhan come from Tamanrasset, known locally as Tam, in the Ahaggar mountains of southern Algeria. They sing in Tamasheq and call their music assouf, a word that carries loss, longing and homesickness. The members met at school in Tam and have been friends since 2004. The band first went by Imarhan N'Tinezraf. Sadam has glossed the longer name as friends in the desert, and said it was cut down so it would travel more easily. The label renders Imarhan as the ones I care about.

Iyad Moussa Ben Abderahmane, known as Sadam, sings lead and plays guitar. Eyadou Ag Leche, the bassist of Tinariwen, bought him his first guitar and taught him to play, and Sadam has said Tinariwen in a sense educated him. When conflict in northern Mali kept some Tinariwen members from travelling, he spent about a year and a half in their touring band. He also names Ali Farka Touré, Habib Koité, jazz, blues and rock among his influences. Tam had no real venues, so Imarhan started out at weddings, at festivals such as the Festival of the Hoggar, and at jams with friends. Their first shows abroad were in Italy and Belgium, and the first song they wrote was Imarhan, about who they are and how they sound.

A new generation

They recorded their debut very fast in Montreuil, a suburb of Paris, in 2014, with Eyadou Ag Leche and Patrick Votan producing. The single Tahabort, named after a market square in Tam where Tuareg of every generation gather, came out in 2015, and late that year the band played the Rencontres Trans Musicales in Rennes. Imarhan followed on City Slang on 29 April 2016, opening with Tarha Tadagh. The Guardian gave it four stars, and Songlines made it Editor's Choice, judging that no Tuareg band had ever sounded so varied.

The press cast them from the start as the new wave of Tuareg music. Sadam described Imarhan as the third generation of Tamasheq bands. That spring they made their first North American tour, recording a session with Howe Gelb and playing a rehearsal that Usher watched and filmed at Venice Beach, before dates across Europe and British summer festivals.

There will be a new generation after Imarhan.

Sadam, 2016

Temet

The band prepared most of their second album in Tamanrasset but recorded it in Paris in early 2017, because, Sadam said, conditions at home were not good enough for recording. That year they sang backing vocals on Tinariwen's Elwan, and the filmmaker Vincent Moon spent about two weeks with them in Tam and the Assekrem making the documentary Children of Tam. Temet, whose title means connections, came out on 23 February 2018 and added funk, fuzz, disco and rock to their desert blues. Songlines found it even more adventurous than the debut. Tumast, a song they had played live since 2016, went out as a promo single, and the band spent the spring touring Europe and the United States.

Aboogi and Essam

In 2019, with help from Africa Express, Imarhan built Aboogi Studio in Tamanrasset, the first professional studio in the region. It is two round buildings of cinder block and dried mud, named after the first semi-permanent round houses the Tuareg built when they settled in the town. Sessions began in March 2020, just before the pandemic closed borders, and were recorded mostly live with the engineer Maxime Kosinetz. Aboogi (2022), their first album made entirely in Algeria, drew guests including the Tinariwen co-founder Mohamed Ag Itlale, known as Japonais, who died in 2021, and Gruff Rhys, who sings in Welsh on the closing track. PopMatters gave it nine out of ten. The studio now records younger Tamanrasset bands.

Essam, meaning lightning, followed on 16 January 2026. It was made at Aboogi and produced by Kosinetz with Emile Papandreou of UTO, who sampled the band's live instruments and ran them through a modular synth. Sadam said they took risks they had never taken before, and Far Out called it one of the most innovative and beautiful blues albums in recent memory. The five-piece line-up of the debut still stands, and toured Britain and Europe through 2026.