Abri & The Everlasting Explore Connection & Selfhood on ‘The Healing’

Dubai-based neo-soul and R&B supergroup Abri & The Everlasting returns with their debut full-length album, The Healing.

Unearthed from their vault, the ten-track record was initially conceived during the COVID-19 lockdown. It started in a living room, where band members Hamdan Al Abri, Ratish Chadha, Steven Bedford and Jerome Deligero got together for jamming sessions, recording whatever came out of those nights. There was no stage to prepare for and no clear idea of when live music would return, so those sessions gave them something to do with all that uncertainty. Years on, The Healing still sounds relevant. Released via UAE independent label Ishtar Global, the tracks’ sonic palette moves through soul, funk, R&B, reggae, Afrobeat and jazz, all within a psychedelic-infused rock framework.

Al Abri is hardly new to this territory. As the frontman of the outfit, and through projects including Abri & Funk Radius and Abri & The Dream Fleet, he has spent years developing a distinctive sound that pulls from soul, funk, reggae and their adjacent genres. Here, that sonic vocabulary meets Chadha’s intricate drum patterns, Steven’s growling bass and Jerome’s funky guitar riffs, resulting in a sonic palette that is less polished into a fixed genre than allowed to breathe around the players, absorbing the spirit of D’Angelo, Bob Marley, James Brown and Fela Kuti, all combined in a refreshing effort.

Thematically, the album offers an expansive meditation on recovery when life leaves people trapped inside circumstances they didn’t choose. While lockdown provides its first thematic frame, the record reaches beyond one moment, treating creation, connection and collective expression as ways of moving forward.

The album opens with ‘Ocean’, and its imagery immediately evokes an unsettling feeling of discomfort. Al Abri sings about wading through water, rising tides and currents that refuse to let up. While there is an overall sense of being carried by circumstances rather than choosing where to go, the song’s refrain takes a more introspective turn, painting the ocean as something that is no longer simply outside him, but as currents moving through him.

Another standout on the record is ‘Four Walls’, which begins as a blues number before unexpectedly unfurling into an upbeat, disco-tinged tune, reflecting on the freedom and healing that come with human connection as one moves beyond the confinement of their four walls, whether physical or emotional. Meanwhile, ‘Sister’ celebrates closeness regained, imagining a dance in which freedom means having time to slow down and live in the moment.

The short ‘Meditation Lude’ provides a refreshing pause before ‘Outro Lude’ and the album’s closing track, ‘Through Your Eyes’. At first, the closer feels more distant than the songs before it. Its lyrics describe sharing things across distance, watching years pass and seeing familiar people from afar. Then the song arrives at a much simpler exchange: “Hello, how you been? / How are you coping?” That ending gives the album a quieter conclusion than ‘Four Walls’ might suggest.

After spending much of the record talking about getting out, moving again and reclaiming freedom, The Healing finishes with communication. The question of how someone is coping brings the record back to the circumstances that started it, but from a different perspective. The world may have changed; the need to check on each other remains.

At 40 minutes, The Healing is concise enough to hold together as one listen, and its sequencing gives the album a sense of progression without forcing every track to make the same point, ultimately expanding the band’s sonic landscape into progressive rock territory.