Pakistani singer Arooj Aftab once again secures Grammy nominations for 2025 awards

Pakistani singer Arooj Aftab has once again secured Grammy nominations for the 2025 awards ceremony.

Arooj’s song ‘Raat Ki Rani’ has earned the nomination in the Best Global Music Performance category. The song is part of her album ‘Night Reign’ that has received recognition in the Best Alternative Jazz Album category, which awards vocal or instrumental albums containing greater than 75 percent playing time of new alternative jazz recordings.

The singer wrote on Instagram, “OMG [oh moy God] YES!!! This will be the fourth year in a row that the @recordingacademy and industry peers have celebrated my music with these accolades and IT FEELS SO GOOD.”

“Thank you thank you thank youuuuu and keep spinning Night Reign we are just getting started,” she added.

In 2022, Arooj became the first Pakistani singer to win a Grammy for her song ‘Mohabbat’ in the Best Global Music Performance category. She had been nominated in two categories for the 2024 Grammy Awards, the highest honors in the music industry.

The 39-year-old, who has lived in New York for some 15 years, has been steadily gaining global attention for her work that fuses ancient Sufi traditions with folk and jazz music. After growing up in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, Aftab moved to the US at age 19 to attend Berklee College of Music in Boston.

The now Brooklyn-based singer/songwriter first gained critical acclaim for Bird Under Water and Siren Islands in the mid-2010s, but it was 2021’s Vulture Prince — a delicate, seven-track project dedicated to the memory of her late brother — that propelled Aftab to stardom.