NEW YORK, NY.- “Funeral for Justice,” the new album by African musician Mdou Moctar, opens with a blast of angry, snarling guitar and an accusation raised like a fist against the rulers of his native Niger and beyond.

“African leaders, hear my burning question,” Moctar sings, as his band churns with a ragged intensity reminiscent of vintage White Stripes. “Why does your ear only heed France and America?”

Over about a decade of touring in the West, Moctar, 40, has carved out a niche as a modern African guitar hero and one of the very few voices in the pop world calling attention to the struggles of the Tuareg people, a historically nomadic ethnic group in the Sahara region. On the guitar, he is a spellbinding psychedelic soloist, with a style that draws as much from Jimi Hendrix and Eddie Van Halen as from traditional Tuareg wedding dances, and he has earned an awed respect from some of rock’s most famous axe-wielders.

“Us guitar players in the West, we all have the same base vocabulary, the same handful of stereotypical licks,” Kirk Hammett of Metallica said in an interview. “But Mdou’s music, it’s almost free of that stuff. And because of that, it sounds more spontaneous. It sounds fresh. It’s amazing.”

Moctar’s last album, “Afrique Victime,” was on many music critics’ year-end lists in 2021, with Jon Pareles of The New York Times saying it “expands the sonic possibilities of Tuareg rock.” But “Funeral for Justice,” due May 3, amps up the urgency in his work. It is a cri de coeur of screaming guitars and lyrics decrying the legacy of colonialism in Niger and throughout Africa, where Western powers retain a strong but not always welcome influence, and political and economic instability are endemic hazards.

In a wide-ranging recent interview at the New York offices of his record label, the lanky, bearded Moctar — who often wears a turban and robes onstage but was dressed in a teal hoodie and matching socks — described the political and social crisis behind his latest songs. Among those are “Oh France,” a bitter broadside against Niger’s former ruling power, which maintained a military presence there until late last year; and “Modern Slaves,” inspired by the desperate, sometimes deadly, paths of African migrants in the West.

“What we’re seeing today is just a modernized version of colonialism, something that’s been inherited by the descendants of colonizers,” said Moctar, who spoke in English and French, with the help of an interpreter. “Of course, today it’s being done with modern technologies and more subtle ways of manipulating people.”

“It seems that only our raw resources that are extracted from the ground are free,” he added. “But our currency, which was created by others for us, is not welcome. And neither are we. Is that freedom? Is that justice? Is that equality?”

The problems of Niger, a landlocked desert nation in West Africa, may be little known to most Americans, and Google Translate is no help when it comes to Tamasheq, the Tuareg language that Moctar sings in (along with some French). But it could be time for Moctar to get his message heard widely. “Funeral for Justice,” his seventh LP, is the second one released by Matador Records, an indie-rock powerhouse with a legacy of acts like Pavement, Yo La Tengo and Liz Phair. Last summer, Moctar and his band performed at Central Park SummerStage, and in April they played at Coachella, alongside stars like Lana Del Rey and Tyler, the Creator.

“I want to be calling out crimes or injustice in the world, and I want you to feel like the sound you’re hearing is someone calling out, ‘Help!’” he said. “If you hear a siren going ‘wee-oo, wee-oo,’ that tells you that something terrible is happening, right? So I want you to know how serious this is.”

MOCTAR’S ORIGINS ARE about as far from the Coachella stage as you can get.

He grew up in Tchintabaraden, near Niger’s western border with Mali, with minimal knowledge of Western pop culture. He said he was aware of Michael Jackson, Bob Marley and Celine Dion but knew little about them, calling them all “white,” which he defined as meaning “not from my hometown.” (“But Michael Jackson,” Moctar added with a sly smile, “when I see him, he is not dark, right?”)

Moctar built his first guitar using brake wires from a bicycle, and by the late 2000s he was tinkering with the fundamentals of desert blues — the sound the Tuaregs are known for — blending guitars with electronic tools like Auto-Tune and drum machines. One such hybrid track, “Tahoultine,” became a regional underground hit when people traded it via cellphones. In 2010, the tune made its way to Christopher Kirkley, an American who had quit his tech job and was traveling in West Africa and blogging about its musical culture.

Back home in Portland, Oregon, Kirkley was fascinated by “Tahoultine,” but the song’s author was a mystery, identified on the track only as “Mdou” (pronounced EM-doo). After a year of online sleuthing, Kirkley finally made contact with Moctar and traveled back to Niger to meet him and discuss working together. One of the first things Moctar said to him, Kirkley recalled, was, “How do I get to tour?”

Kirkley became Moctar’s promoter, making five albums with Moctar on his small label, Sahel Sounds, and helping organize his first tours in Europe. In 2015, Kirkley raised $18,000 on Kickstarter to direct Moctar in a Tuareg remake of Prince’s “Purple Rain,” casting Moctar as a motorcycle-riding guitar rebel struggling to make his mark. Its title was “Akounak Tedalat Taha Tazoughai,” or “Rain the Color of Blue With a Little Red in It” — Tamasheq, Moctar told Kirkley, has no word for purple.

On tour in Europe and the United States, Moctar played dive bars, DIY punk spaces and sedate world-music venues. With his band, he began to develop a sound that could wow any audience: hypnotic grooves built on the harmonic foundations that West African music shares with the blues, lit up by Moctar’s pyrotechnic solos — a type of shredding that, to Western ears, can sound completely uninhibited, like an inspired poet crying in some unknown language.

“When I compose my solos,” Moctar said, “I’m not trying to look for them very hard. It’s more that they come to me.”

By 2019, when Moctar released “Ilana (The Creator),” his last record on Sahel Sounds, he was touring more widely in the West, and his music was beginning to circulate among rock’s cognoscenti. Last summer, when military leaders staged a coup in Niger, temporarily closing the nation’s borders, the band was on tour in the United States, and a crowdfunding campaign was begun to support the members until they could return. The biggest donation — $10,000 — came from Jack White.

Moctar signed with Matador in 2020. To some extent, the rock market has been primed for an artist like him. About a decade ago, American indie labels signed a raft of African artists, including Blk Jks and Sidi Touré. And other Tuareg acts have made inroads, including Tinariwen, a Malian collective, and Bombino, a fellow Nigerien guitarist whose 2013 album “Nomad” was produced by Dan Auerbach of the Black Keys.

Gerard Cosloy, a co-owner of Matador, acknowledged that language barriers are a problem not easily overcome in the selling of a rock band, but he said the label was committed to helping Moctar reach as wide an audience as possible.

“We’re going to find people one at a time, five at a time, 10 at a time,” Cosloy said. “And if this doesn’t achieve critical mass on the level of the biggest acts in the world, well, that’ll be something else that Mdou has in common with Pavement and Yo La Tengo.”

SINCE 2017, MOCTAR’S bassist and primary musical collaborator has been Mikey Coltun, 31, who grew up amid the punk scene in Washington, D.C., and, as a teenager, made a life-changing trip to Africa with his guitarist father. Moctar — who at one point during our interview excused himself for Islamic prayers — praised Coltun’s musicianship and added: “The fact that Mikey doesn’t smoke or drink helps us on tour.”

“Funeral for Justice” was recorded over five days in 2022 in a rented house near the Catskill Mountains in upstate New York. Moctar’s band had been developing the songs on the road, and Coltun, who produced the album, wanted to capture the same spontaneity and fire of their live show. He encouraged Moctar to ignore the clock and “just play,” and told Souleymane Ibrahim, the drummer, to bash away without restraint.

“In the moments where I’m maybe speeding up a bit, I can read in the other members’ faces that I’m doing good,” Ibrahim said. “And that’s the moment where I want to go even more crazy.” (The band also includes Ahmoudou Madassane on rhythm guitar.)

Coltun took digital files of the band’s long jams and edited them into tighter cuts of four to five minutes. The result is more focused and intense than any of the band’s previous work. “This is a record that we couldn’t have made until now,” Coltun says. “There’s a trust that we have between the four of us.”

In the lyrics, Moctar attacks weak African leaders (“Occupiers are carving up your lands,” he sings, “gallantly marching all over your resources”) and calls for pride among the Tuareg, a people divided by national borders who have fought Niger over land and access to resources like uranium. In calling out France, Moctar says that his musical ancestors may have written more oblique complaints, but he prefers to name names.

“I would rather say the truth directly, even if it endangers me,” Moctar said, adding that he received death threats after voicing support for Niger’s ousted president, Mohamed Bazoum. Moctar said he was not in favor of the coup, but was glad that the new leaders asked the French to leave. “That’s a good thing in and of itself.”

The cover art for Moctar’s last three albums, including “Funeral for Justice,” established a sleek, retro visual brand for the group, adapting a classic rock look with African iconography including a purple-black pied crow — common in Niger — and various iterations of the continent’s horned shape.

All were created by Robert Beatty, a musician and artist in Lexington, Kentucky, who said that when he was first approached, for “Ilana,” the band gave a very specific brief, including the crow and the Cross of Agadez. The band also cited airbrushed rock albums from the late 1970s and early ’80s by Judas Priest, ELO and Journey, with a dramatic, cartoonish aesthetic and repeated motifs and characters.

For “Funeral for Justice,” Beatty depicted bleeding crows falling over a coffin surrounded by a rising tide of blood. As he sent drafts of the image for approval, Beatty said, the band made a request: “More blood! More blood!”

Despite the mythos, Moctar is a typically practical working musician. Cosloy, of Matador, said that at their first meeting Moctar asked specific questions about getting vinyl records pressed. And behind the scenes, Moctar’s career has also involved a standard music-industry story of a rising star shedding business partners along the way.

After the band’s profile was raised by “Ilana,” Moctar took on new management and began to negotiate with Matador. Kirkley, who said he never had any contracts with Moctar for his work on Sahel Sounds, was left out of the loop. After the deal was done, Moctar took his earlier recordings with him, which are now being released online by Matador. Kirkley said he has not spoken to Moctar since. “In retrospect,” he said, “I was really naive to think that I could be friends with musicians on the label.”

When asked why left Sahel Sounds, Moctar said: “Matador offered me a new market and I found it interesting. It’s not me who’s trying to leave Sahel, it’s my music that has taken on dimension. And if you grow up, you have to change the size.”

Moctar is more interested in talking about how his music can convey the struggles of Niger and, possibly, change them. The specifics of the political situation there may be obscure to many Americans, but the anticolonial sentiment at the heart of his music may well register.

He criticizes the United States for maintaining a drone base in his country, ostensibly to help combat terrorism, though, he says, the American forces have accomplished little in that regard. He points to an attack in March 2021 by “criminals on motorbikes” near his home in the Tahoua area, which he says left 270 dead. (The U.S. State Department has reported an incident at that time in which “terrorists” killed an estimated 177 civilians in three villages there.)

“As long as Americans see the situation as acceptable the way it is now,” he said, “things don’t change.”

He added: “I’m coming from very far in a country in which people today are being killed every day with all this suffering, and I come to the U.S. to make people smile and dance. And it is a big effort. So what I would like is for people to then also want to help improve the lives of where I come from.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.