Young Dervish is the alias of Minneapolis-based multi-instrumentalist, singer-songwriter, and producer Zakariya Khan. Born in Pakistan and raised in Saudi Arabia, Khan's fascination with the guitar started at age 11. "A lot of my earliest memories were surrounded by music from that part of the world… all these different ways that people sing and play their instruments," he says. Rooted in the Twin Cities' music scene since college, Khan builds fretless guitars, preferring the freedom and innate cadence required to balance notes on your own, to keep them precise only by ear. "It forces me to carefully listen to what's coming out of my guitar and be selective about what to play in each moment." 

In 2024, after years of producing and engineering music for others, he started sharing self-recorded performance videos with a growing audience on Instagram, resetting his process to get in touch with songwriting on its purest level. The free-flowing clips capture the spirit of an artist unlocking something from within; they can be seen now as a window into the many riffs and hooks that animate his full-length debut, Fretless Sex. Fusing blues, folk, and pop music, the album is marked by boundless expression. These songs find Khan following a surge of creative energy, deeply tuned to his instruments, mainly guitar, drums, piano, and voice. 

While his past projects under his given name have swelled into dense tracks stacked within Ableton, here, the artist is streamlined, unweighted by digital layers. "I could get the same type of nuance and depth, and feeling without having to do a whole lot on the computer," he explains. Going fretless "felt like I was relearning how to play again, all these new ideas and sounds to play with...a whole new world, and I just kept writing songs in it. Everything's right here. It just felt very liberating." The intimacy of Fretless Sex moves past the lvrical, bevond love and other human pursuits; these are cosmic songs produced with maximum bodily groove from an artist reaching for meaning, one chord at a time.