Egyptian singer Maryam Saleh strikes an irreverent but introspective tone on her new single “Baghanny” as she ponders the challenges of a creative life. “Every time I sing, I find / I raise my voice, the more I raise, the more I find… I find that my voice is not my own,” she sings in Egyptian Arabic over a synthpop beat laid down by Syrian producer Hello Psychaleppo. It’s a powerful sentiment coming from a beloved icon of alternative Arabic music, who has explored countless creative directions in her career. Saleh wrote the track’s lyrics, and in a few lines she alludes to a lot of complex feelings—of being responsible to your fans, of facing down critics, of looking for a new creative spark. In the end, she can’t help but continue with her lifelong passion: “Despite myself, I want to sing.”

And sing Saleh does on this candy-coloured earworm. Hello Psychaleppo is best known for his electronic take on Tarab music from Arabic classical tradition, and here the duo structure their lyrics and riffs around a genre of lighthearted songs called the taqtoqa. The beatmaker infuses his whimsical, four-to-the-floor builds with ebullient Arabic synth phrasings and rhythmic syncopations. “Baghanny'' takes a breezier turn compared to some of his past work, with a drum machine that clicks together like clockwork. But then he delivers a dose of pure joy with an anthemic hook that can easily get stuck in your head long after the track has come to an end. Naturally, Saleh is a game collaborator, her yearning refrains giving the club-friendly groove a human touch.

Maryam Saleh habitually pushes the boundaries of Arabic music. A luminary of Egypt’s alternative music scene, she delivers a savvy mix of old and new, infusing shaabi and folk styles with innovative techniques and fearless personality. Once described as a “musical supernova” by Scene Noise, Saleh is a singer, composer, actor, and poet. As the teenage frontwoman of the band Gawaz Safar in the early 2000s, she revived the decades-old protest songs of folk legend Sheikh Imam for a younger audience. She broke new creative ground with the dizzying electro beats and sarcastic poetry of 2015’s Halawella, a critically-acclaimed album she recorded with Soap Kills’ Zeid Hamdan. In 2017, she boosted her profile even further across the Middle East, North Africa and Europe with Lekhfa, an opus of haunting lyricism and transcendent psychedelia made in collaboration with musicians Tamer Abu Ghazaleh and Maurice Louca and poet Mido Zoheir. Since the late 2000s, she has also taken on memorable roles in TV, theatre, and film—including Ibrahim El-Batout’s Ein Shams (2008) and Tamer El Said’s In the Last Days of the City (2016).

Hailing from one of the most musically rich cities in the Levant, Hello Psychaleppo is the brainchild of pioneering Syrian music producer and visual artist Samer Saem Eldahr. Deeply rooted in Arabic music, Hello Psychaleppo’s work captivates listeners with melodic strains of Tarab threaded seamlessly with his distinct strain of electronic music.

Hello Psychaleppo’s first album “Gool Lʼah”, pioneered the genre of Electro-Tarab, with his productions gaining a significant following both in the Arab World and internationally. Described by VICE Magazine as “a pastiche of twitchy electronic sounds and golden age Arab pop music of the 1950s and 60s… alternately danceable and cathartic, melancholic and apocalyptic.” Since his seminal 2013 release, Hello Psychaleppo has released two full albums, “HA” (2014) and “Toyour” (2017), the EP “Jismal” (2021) alongside a wide array of collaborations with artists such as Bu Nasser Touffar, El Far3i and Nass El Hal and most recently with Turkish pop artist Mabel Matiz.