The dunya has put Canadian Sudanese singer Mustafa through the ringer. The Arabic word, which means “this world,” has no real English equivalent. The phrase that comes closest to capturing what the term means in Islam might be “the human condition,” which for Muslims is brief compared to the eternal afterlife. Knowing that this dunya is fleeting offers consolation to the faithful who endure its hardest trials: war, poverty, grief. At just 28, Mustafa has been touched by all of the above, and the former poet processes these experiences openly in his sorrowful, searching music.

When Smoke Rises, his debut, focused on commemorating the dead. Over flickering production from Frank Dukes, Jamie xx, and Simon Hessman, Mustafa breathed warmth into the contradictions of his Toronto neighborhood of Regent Park, which he’s called a “dreamland and a graveyard.” His seamless fusion of hood idioms and folk vocals turned senseless deaths—like that of his friend and fellow Halal Gang member Smoke Dawg—into tender odes to platonic love. On Dunya, Mustafa widens his sound and the scope of his storytelling, using varied strains of electronic and folk music to explore the worlds within and beyond Regent Park. If When Smoke Rises was a funeral, Dunya is the strange days and years afterward, when death settles into the fabric of life.

Mustafa, who’s previously described his music as “love letters to the hood,” spends a lot of time on this record rethinking both the hood and love. The death of his older brother, who was shot and killed in Toronto last year, colors the songwriting, which is more panoramic than his earlier, diaristic work. When he rinses his hands of his hometown on “Leaving Toronto,” a track that quietly stews with rage, it feels like he’s truly speaking to the entire Six. “If we’re burning this city tell me where to start/I’m leaving the things that I said/Last of my friends help me shut my eyes/Oh, I still haven’t slept,” Mustafa sings with chilling reluctance. The city’s ambient violence has disappointed him so deeply that even his appetite for vengeance is diminished. But if the quest for retribution doesn’t go his way, he can make peace with that as well. “And if they ever kill me/Make sure they bury me next to my brother/Make sure my killer has money for a lawyer,” he croons.

“Gaza Is Calling” offers another tale of death and estrangement. The lyrics concern a Palestinian friend from childhood with whom Mustafa’s lost contact, and detail the subtle ways Gaza’s ongoing occupation closed the kid off from intimacy. No amount of hanging out, talking, or gift-giving seems to bridge the wall between them. “There’s a place in your heart that I can’t get into,” Mustafa laments as an elegant oud arrangement ripples beneath him, the instrument a subtle marker of their shared connection to the Middle East. Mustafa sounds both devastated and hopeful, a contrast played up by the shifting production, which begins with minimal string and piano melodies and later erupts into a rumbling IDM beat.

Throughout the record, Mustafa and his collaborators tether grief and despair to other feelings. The production credits include Hessman, DJ Dahi, Aaron Dessner of the National, and Rodaidh McDonald (Sampha, the xx), who layer the songs with rhythms and textures that fill out this expanded emotional world. Lambent Rhodes and flute melodies flutter beneath the breathy singing of “Hope is a knife.” A looped rap verse, presumably from someone close to Mustafa, repeatedly pops up on “Leaving Toronto.”

These arrangements underscore that folk is a roomy and worldly tent; the seamless mixing of instruments like the oud and masenqo with rap drums nod to all the genres and places that inform Mustafa’s style. He’s not a gallivanter pulling from every far-flung locale, like Sudan Archives or Madlib, but he’s definitely a syncretist. The spiritual “I’ll Go Anywhere,” where Mustafa happily pledges to go anywhere to be closer to his god, is as cosmopolitan as a passport: Flamenco claps, a buoyant sample of singing children, and exaltant vocals from Rosalía percolate in the background. Despite its endless hardships, the dunya is a tapestry of sensations and perspectives.

Mustafa’s pliant, breathy singing holds all these threads together. His weary rasp can convey distress and concern, as on the elegiac “What Happened, Mohamed?” It can radiate regret and longing, as on the upbeat and nostalgic “Old Life.” Or it can sound warm and playful, the approach Mustafa takes on subversive single “SNL.” Short for “street nigga lullaby,” the song is sneakily about drive-bys and retaliation. But Mustafa doesn’t emphasize action, instead narrating the quiet domestic scenes that take place before the violence, almost as if saving these moments from corruption. “Yelling gang gang gang in my room,” he sings with the sweetness of a parent serenading a child, softening the drill-associated chant. He constantly finds ways to chip away at the numbed hardness of Black masculinity even as he implicates himself in its tragic rituals.

In many ways, Dunya is about finding new rituals, better ones, for himself and his peers. The love Mustafa has for Toronto is tougher now, more guarded and distant. “The voices that are cheering aren’t for you, listen closely my nigga,” he warns at one point. These could be the words of a hermit or paranoiac, but in Mustafa’s hands they are invitations—to seek peace, to pay attention, to bear this dunya.