Yet the further he moved from home, the more insistently home found its way back into the music. And what began as a passing curiosity soon developed into something closer to an obsession. He started listening more closely, digging through archives, studying the structures and histories of raï and the wider musical traditions of the Arab world; not in search of aesthetic shorthand, but understanding.
“I didn’t want to make an Aladdin version of Arab music with two or three clichés,” he explains. “I wanted to understand how it works, where it comes from.” The music remained unmistakably pop, but it mattered to him that every choice rested on something more substantial than surface-level borrowing. “The most important thing for me was to do it with respect and to know where it comes from and why I’m using it.”
That respect, however, extends beyond the music itself. To him, raï was never just a genre as “back then, it was the pop music of its generation,” he recalled. “Today it’s rap, but raï once occupied that place.”
It’s also why he resists reducing the genre to a set of familiar sounds. “The purpose of raï was to talk about subjects that, at the time, were considered taboo,” he explained. “It was there to challenge people’s mentality.” While many listeners associate raï with a particular sonic palette, Elias insists the genre has always thrived on reinvention. “You’ve had raï with flamenco guitars, raï influenced by Indian music, raï with rock… there’s never been just one way of defining it.”
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What binds those different inflections of the genre together, he argues, isn’t musical orthodoxy but something far less tangible. “It’s not just the music,” he reflected. “It’s the artist’s energy, their attitude, the way they carry themselves. That’s why you can hear a song and say, ‘That’s raï,’ even if, musically, it doesn’t follow all the traditional codes.”
He even argues that the movement’s biggest names deserve a category of their own. “We have ‘pop stars.’ We have ‘rock stars.’ I almost think we need another word for those artists.” The comparison, he explains, has less to do with sound than presence. “Tomorrow I could make a song inspired by something completely different, but you’ll still feel that influence in the attitude, the energy, the way of being.”
And it’s precisely that spirit he hopes to reclaim. “I want to make it cool again, not because I’m looking for a certain image, but because I think we’ve looked at this culture from a distance for too long.” The music is only one part of that mission. The photography, the styling, the videos; each serves as another way of reframing a culture he believes deserves to be seen through a contemporary lens.
The impulse is also rooted in memory. “Thirty years ago, raï was looked down on,” he said. “It wasn’t played on the radio.” During Algeria’s Black Decade, the genre’s artists paid a heavy price for making music that challenged social norms, with figures like Cheb Hasni becoming enduring symbols of that era. Acknowledging that history is inseparable from carrying the music forward to him. “If I have the chance, even on my own small scale, to shine a light on that culture again,” he proudly expressed, “even if it only reaches ten people, that’s already enough for me.”
His relationship with raï, however, isn’t without its complexities. Born and raised on the other side of the Mediterranean, Elias has often found himself questioning what gives him the legitimacy to reinterpret a tradition so closely tied to a country he didn’t grow up in. “For a long time, I felt like I wasn’t Algerian enough,” he admits. “I didn’t grow up there. I don’t have the same references as someone who was raised in Algeria every day.“
Those doubts never disappeared entirely. Instead, they became the reason he approached the music with such care. “I felt like I had to earn the right to do it,” he reflected. “That’s why I spent so much time listening, researching, and understanding where it all came from.”
“Sometimes you ask yourself if you’re really legitimate,” he admitted. “At first, I didn’t even think about it. But when articles about my music started coming out—I started seeing comments from people in Algeria supporting me. That meant a lot.“
Validation, however, never quite silenced the doubt. “At the same time,” he added, “you tell yourself maybe you’re not the one who should be getting all the attention. There are artists over there doing incredible work who’ve been there for years, and they deserve that recognition too.”
And that’s perhaps why Elias never speaks of reviving the genre, but of understanding it. His ambition isn’t to become the face of a movement or to position himself as its standard-bearer. It’s to contribute, however modestly, to a tradition that has never stood still, and, if he’s lucky, leave it a little richer than he found it.
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