Palestinian-American post-punk band DUNUMS releases new single

Songwriter Sijal Nasralla said his band DUNUMS’ latest single “honeycomb art on a billion twins” is an evocation of love. 

During the COVID-19 lockdown, Nasralla’s daughter Tasneem was born at the same time as the child of one of his close friends inside the same birth center. Nasralla strung together his thoughts and feelings and created his single to honor two souls who came during a difficult time, he said. 

“You know, being in love with these kids is really silly, in that things would emerge with me making up songs all the time and singing them,” Nasralla said. 

Nasralla, who is from a refugee family, founded DUNUMS in 2010 after visiting family in Palestine. He said he came up with the name after seeing an Ottoman-era document which detailed 400 dunums — a unit of area — that belonged to his family before it was reserved for a Jewish settlement near Jerusalem in 1948. 

“That became a vehicle for me to reflect and express myself in my musicality and my relationship to identity,” Nasralla said.

The single has roughly three acts, beginning with bounciness, then having a progressive driving section and ending in an emotional catharsis. In the third act, Nasralla added slowed down 2000s emo anthems to create a more nostalgic experience. 

The single, which is part of the album called “I wasn’t that thought,” was recorded at his house with the help of musicians including a drummer, keyboardist, bassist and supporting vocalists. Nasralla played guitar for the song and assisted with songwriting and production. 

While DUNUMS is a punk band, Nasralla said that he is an improviser, using punk more as a set of values.

“I like punk as an approach to making music that's vigorous, energetic, political and just aggressive,” Nasralla said. “I love that punk music, but I think overall, I am inspired by a lot of different kinds of passionate music like emo, hardcore and soulful music.”

Even though DUNUMS is a personal project, Nasralla said he has enjoyed bringing in different people to perform with him over the years. 

Sinclair Palmer, a bassist for DUNUMS, said the process of brainstorming music ideas started by working with voice memo recordings of Nasralla’s improvised guitar playing and then further experimenting with different basses and melodies. 

“You know how there are those bars where you can tell the bartender what you're feeling and they'll make a drink for you? He'll give us feelings that he has about the song and we do our best to interpret those things musically,” Palmer said. 

Michael Figueroa, an associate professor in the music department, is a scholar specializing in Arab American music and performance. Being of Arab American heritage himself, he said he admires DUNUMS as a diasporic project.

Additionally, Figueroa said DUNUMS helps to capture the ambivalence that diasporic people have toward the regions from which their families emigrated from as well as the places that they currently live in.

“Musical events often provide occasions for gathering, for being and feeling together in the same space, which is especially important in this day and age when often we engage with one another through virtual means,” Figueroa said.  

After working on the album, Palmer said that the experience has taught them to reckon with what it means to be a working artist. They said their priorities have changed while working on the album due to how gratifying and loving the group is. 

“It's taught me to embody music in a way that I have not felt this deeply before,” Palmer said. 

CLARIFICATION: This article has been updated to clarify that the namesake of the band comes from dunums of land owned by Nasralla’s family.

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