Interviews

In ‘Awda’, Zeyne Made the Album She Needed to Hear

BYMeriem Belhiba

October 30, 2025

Awda opens like light slipping through silver. It’s reflective, tender, and hard to pin down. The debut album from Palestinian-Jordanian artist Zeyne feels like both a release and a reckoning, transforming displacement into melody and belonging into motion. “It’s how I process the world,” she tells MILLE. “Creating gives me a way to take what’s heavy and turn it into something that might bring comfort or clarity.”

Across thirteen tracks, the 27-year-old crooner builds a sonic landscape where Arabic and English drift naturally into one another, where ancestral echoes meet modern synths, and hope still finds a place to breathe. But Awda, meaning return, moves beyond nostalgia, tracing movement through the pause between what was and what’s next. “It’s how I remind myself that there’s still purpose in creating,” she says.

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A post shared by zeyne | زين (@zeyne)

The album came after a long silence. Following another wave of violence in Palestine, Zeyne stopped making music for months. “If Awda had been made earlier, it wouldn’t be the same,” she admits. “It was born from that exact moment—emotionally, politically, personally.”

Her first song back was Bali. “Writing it felt like finally being able to breathe again.” From there came Asli Ana and Hilwa, songs her audience already knew but which took on new meaning within the record’s larger story.

Awda moves through loss, clarity, and renewal with deliberate pacing. Each track opens up a new emotional space while returning to the same quiet rhythm that feels like coming home after being away too long. “There was a lot of heaviness, but also urgency,” she recalls. “That mix of grief, pride, and longing pushed me to make something that felt like truth.”

The album came together across continents, with Nasir in Amman, Khalil in Paris, Ratchopper in Tunis, and mixing engineer Kauner Michael in Los Angeles. “It felt chaotic in the best way,” Zeyne says. “A blend of so many minds and hearts.” The record also features Saint Levant, whose saxophone drifts through Arrib Minni, and Bayou, whose verse on 6 il Sobh brings a dusky tenderness. The collaborations don’t feel like features so much as pieces of the same fabric, each adding a new texture to Zeyne’s sense of return.

Working with Scarab Records and MDLBEAST helped bring the project to life. “They made us feel like no dream was too big,” she says. “They didn’t want what was convenient, they wanted what was true.” That support gave her freedom to take risks, to lean into vulnerability, and to say things exactly as she felt them.

One of Awda’s quiet strengths lies in its bilingual storytelling. The artist moves between Arabic and English with an ease that mirrors her own dual reality. “I don’t choose,” she says. “Arabic carries a weight I can’t translate; English gives me freedom.” In Arabic, her words ache with collective memory. In English, they turn inward, more intimate and unguarded. The transitions never feel calculated; they reflect how many in her generation think, dream, and love across languages.

The project doesn’t try to explain Arabness or make it legible. It simply lives in it. The album joins a growing wave of regional artists reshaping what Arab pop can sound like—fluid, emotional, and unafraid of being both local and global.

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A post shared by zeyne | زين (@zeyne)

Still, the record isn’t only shaped by pain. “Around that time, I was also falling in love,” Zeyne says. “That contrast—the heaviness of the world and the lightness of feeling something new—shaped the album.” Love, here, feels like resistance, a refusal to give up on tenderness. Tracks like Hilwa and Asli Ana pulse with warmth, while Bali carries the ache of release. Traditional textures—the thrum of a dabkeh rhythm, the breath of a mijwiz—anchor that intimacy in memory. “Some sounds instantly pull me back home,” she says. “But they also carry the weight of generations.”

By merging the personal and the collective, Awda becomes more than a debut. It’s a kind of sonic archive, proof that survival can sound like melody and that the future of Arab music lies not in forgetting but in reimagining what’s been passed down.

Ultimately, the album is about motion. It resists binaries—regional yet borderless, tender yet political, rooted yet free. “I want it to remind people that even in uncertainty or pain, there’s beauty in holding on to who you are,” Zeyne says. “It’s about carrying our histories forward, not as a burden but as something that can grow with us.”

That growth defines both the sound and the spirit of the album. Awda captures a generation of Arab artists who no longer need to translate themselves to be understood. Instead, they build new vocabularies of sound and feeling, inviting others to listen without explanation. “Awda isn’t just my story,” she says quietly. “It’s what it means to keep creating—to believe that even in loss, there’s always a way back to yourself.”

In ‘Awda’, Zeyne Made the Album She Needed to Hear

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In ‘Awda’, Zeyne Made the Album She Needed to Hear

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