Interviews

Palestinian Singer Rasha Nahas Is Building a Home Out of Noise

BYMeriem Belhiba

December 3, 2025

In an era where the algorithm dictates the way we feel, Rasha Nahas would rather tune into a different frequency: the trembling circuitry of live rooms where strangers breathe in time. Between Berlin basements and New York backrooms, the Palestinian artist, who was raised in Haifa and is now living between Berlin and the US, has been playing shows that feel less like routine and more like a way of finding direction. On stage she brings rock into a deeply personal space, moving between Arabic and English with the fluidity of someone who has long navigated more than one world.

“It’s going beautiful,” she says of a run that took her through Vienna, Hamburg, Berlin, and two New York shows. “I feel very grateful and blessed, trying to be in it, surrender, and enjoy the moments and the meetings with everyone.” Touring, for Nahas, isn’t just export; it is a kind of return. Outside the Arab world she meets different kinds of listeners — local fans, people hearing her for the first time, and those discovering her by chance — yet the Arab diaspora always forms a quiet, steady centre in the room. “As an audience member myself, I need… to go to concerts by Arab artists,” she admits. “It’s a place where I feel connected.”

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A post shared by Rasha Nahas (@rasha_nahas)

At a recent New York show a standing ovation gathered like a tide. The last song rose and the room rose with it. Some would call it catharsis, others community, others simply the rare moment when strangers feel the same thing at the same time. Nahas would probably call it connection. The rest of us might call it a sign that whatever you name this movement, it is alive.

Connection is the spine of her practice. Her work comes out of Haifa’s underground scene, shaped by years of small shows and tight-knit musical circles. She grew up hearing DAM, Jowan Safadi, El Morabba3, and Mashrou’ Leila — artists who treated the stage as both refuge and declaration. At home, classic Arabic music filled family gatherings and long drives, while in her headphones she carried Lennon, Queen, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and Lou Reed. When she picked up a guitar, the path revealed itself. “Expression led me there,” she explains.

If you’ve followed the wave of Arabic alternative music over the past decade, you can sense her resistance to being pressed into a single narrative. She isn’t interested in being a spokesperson or a cultural explainer. Yet the political is fused to the personal. “When I write a personal song about home,” she says, “it includes these topics… the pain and the grief of witnessing this genocide from afar and feeling so helpless.” The last two years, she adds, have left many speechless. Her response is to keep creating. “Creation is a radical act of hope.”

That hope is sharpening. Her upcoming album due in 2026, written across cities and notebooks and shaped through an intense four-day studio session, leans further into rock and carries a bilingual pulse. Where her 2023 album Amrat felt like a door flung open, this new project feels more intentional, built brick-by-brick. She calls it “more rock” and “more mature,” though she questions what that word even demands. “Maturity is about acceptance,” she says. “You learn your strengths, your limits, the cards you’ve been dealt. You work with them.”

Her process reflects that balance. Nahas writes constantly: morning pages, street-corner notes, 3 a.m. lyric edits. Music, however, asks for ritual. One of her new songs was written in Granada in a friend’s home studio and kept almost exactly as it arrived. It held the energy of its place of birth. This combination of precision and looseness is becoming her signature.

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A post shared by Kallemi كَلِّمِي (@kallemimusic)

It also defines her various artistic worlds. On one side is her main practice,her solo project Rasha Nahas, where she shapes almost everything herself, from production to arrangement to visuals. On the other side she composes music for film, theatre and stage showcasing her multi disciplinary talent as well as being able to immerse herself in her side project, Kallemi, the cross-border band she co-founded with three close collaborators, producer and synth artist Jasmin Albash, Spanish-language rapper La Nefera, and Palestinian singer and multi-instrumentalist Maysa Daw. The project operates long-distance, stretching across countries and time zones, and it runs on shared authorship. Leadership shifts from one member to another, and the four meet only a few times a year for short, intense bursts of writing and recording. “I’m very hands on,” she laughs, but Kallemi teaches her to let go, to trust, to allow things to form without her directing every detail. Keeping the project alive across continents, she says, “is a little miracle.”

Her reach, however, is never limited to subculture. In Vienna she opened for a major Austrian act in front of 3,500 people. “Maybe out of these 3,500 people two people that spoke Arabic,” she says, but the audience moved toward her anyway. In Berlin and New York she drifts between Arabic and English because the rooms hold both. Multilingual storytelling is not a branding tactic but simply a reflection of her life.

She resists the framing of “cultural activism,” though the work she does is undeniably part of a collective movement. “I think in terms of movement,” she says. Arab artists, she insists, do not create in isolation. They create inside a constellation of community spaces, political rupture, and underground histories that held them when institutions did not. She is wary of an industry where influencer logic shapes taste. Visibility, for her, should be a tool, not the goal. Community over clout. Rooms over reach.

There is always a risk of reducing artists like Nahas to neat labels, of turning a complex practice into a shorthand. ‘the voice of a generation,’ ‘the face of a scene,’ ‘the Palestinian rock poet.’ But her work resists that. What feels truer is the steady way she keeps adding detail, rooted in her lineage yet shaped by her own path. She honors where she comes from — the parents and grandparents whose stories sit quietly behind her music — while carving out a space that feels unmistakably her own. Each performance becomes less about claiming territory and more about building a temporary home with the people in the room.

Listen for serrated guitar lines that bloom into melody, bilingual lyrics that refuse easy translation, and songs that carry the ache of distance without glorifying it. Watch for a new album that sounds like acceptance with its teeth still in, more tour dates that double as diaspora gatherings, and Kallemi releases that widen the circle.

Feature Image: Yvonne Hartmann

Palestinian Singer Rasha Nahas Is Building a Home Out of Noise

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Palestinian Singer Rasha Nahas Is Building a Home Out of Noise

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