This fall, New York-based troubadour Ali Aslam will release his debut “supersonic folk” album, The Last American. Aslam’s sound — a unique combination of familiar folk, rock, and pop elements — serves as a backdrop for exploration of “questions of identity, belonging, and perspective — not just as independent concepts, but as interrelated factors that inform our relationships to culture, each other, and ourselves.”

“Anyone with a background as hyphenated as mine — Muslim-American, Pakistani-American — will try and take ownership of that mythology, but also be fundamentally aware that our relationship to those things is qualified, somehow ‘other.’ It applies to my relationship with myself, as well,” said Aslam. “I can love all of these things about myself, and still feel, or be made to feel, like I don’t have a right to. I think, with this record, I’m asking if everybody feels this way.”