Music

The Emirati Musicians You Need on Your Playlist

BYMille Team

September 28, 2026

Ask what an Emirati musician sounds like in 2026 and you’ll get a very different answer depending on who you press play on. It could be EZOW rapping in English over trap production, Fatima folding Arabian jazz into R&B, Mayah Alkhateri pulling Arabic vocals into shoegaze, or Alya making the kind of glossy pop designed for choreography. For a country whose contemporary music industry is still relatively young, the range is already surprisingly wide.

A new generation of Emirati artists is building careers across pop, rap, R&B, indie, and everything that slips through the cracks between them, often without feeling obligated to make their nationality immediately legible through their sound. Some sing in Arabic, others in English, and plenty move between influences gathered far beyond the Gulf. What connects them is less a genre than a willingness to figure out what Emirati music can sound like on their own terms.

Below, meet the names worth adding to your rotation.

Alya

At 21, Dubai-born Alya is making a play for a place in the UAE’s emerging pop landscape. Born to an Emirati father and British mother, the singer, dancer and actress grew up idolizing performers like Beyoncé and Michael Jackson before training at London’s Urdang conservatoire, where she studied everything from commercial dance and ballet to acting and vocals. Her debut single, Lemonade, introduces her with glossy English-language pop and R&B, threaded with Arab-influenced percussion and built, unsurprisingly, for choreography. Released through gamma., the music company co-founded by former Apple Music executive Larry Jackson, the track is the first taste of a forthcoming EP that Alya has had a hand in co-writing and creatively directing.

Fatima

Born Fatima Bin Safwan, the singer has been steadily building her place in the Emirati music scene since winning Yasalam’s Emerging Talent Competition in 2018. The Abu Dhabi-based singer-songwriter, who has Emirati and Honduran roots, went on to open for Bruno Mars that same year before joining Marwan Moussa and ISSAM on Anta Al Batal, the 2021 Middle East track for VALORANT. Her musical education has been equally international, taking her to Berklee NYC, where she completed a master’s degree focused on songwriting and production in 2022. After stepping back from releasing music for several years, Fatima returned in 2026 with The Veiled Essence, a deeply personal four-track EP that folds R&B and soul into Arabian jazz influences while tackling betrayal, identity, vulnerability, and healing. It’s a sound that feels distinctly her own, shaped as much by her multicultural upbringing as the Emirati music community she has spent years helping push forward.

Mayah Alkhateri

The Emirati-Egyptian singer-songwriter makes up one half of Kiss Facility alongside Irish-Chilean producer Salvador Navarrete, better known as Sega Bodega, pairing hazy guitars, electronic production, and dream-pop atmospherics with lyrics sung in Arabic. The duo first emerged in 2023 before releasing their debut EP, Esoteric, the following year, exploring everything from loneliness and identity to the evil eye through a sound that owes as much to ’90s shoegaze as it does to the Arabic melodies Alkhateri grew up hearing. In 2026, they pushed that experiment further with their debut album, Khazna, recorded in Paris and featuring tracks including Kotshena, Qamar 14, and Absent From My Eyes. For Alkhateri, singing in Arabic is central to the project, opening a space for the language within genres where it has historically been far less visible. The result makes Kiss Facility one of the more intriguing acts to emerge from the UAE’s increasingly adventurous alternative music scene.

EZOW

EZOW has his sights set well beyond Dubai. Born Salim Alnuaimi, the Emirati rapper started making music as a teenager, drawing from Eminem, 50 Cent and Travis Scott while developing what he calls a distinctly “Dubai sound.” His 2022 debut EP, Concrete Jungle, captured the growing pains of building a rap career in a homegrown hip-hop scene still finding its footing. By 2023, he was performing at Coca-Cola Arena alongside Chris Brown and Sean Kingston, and a year later, Forbes Middle East named him to its 30 Under 30 list. For an artist intent on taking Emirati hip-hop global, the groundwork is already there.

Zarooni

If the UAE’s indie scene still feels like relatively uncharted territory, Zarooni is happily wandering around in it. Born Mohamed Al Zarooni, the Emirati singer-songwriter moves between indie rock, dream pop, electronic music, and the occasional hint of country, turning a fairly eclectic set of influences into something distinctly his own. After beginning to release original music in 2024, he followed with a steady run of singles while bringing them to life onstage with his band, Zarooni Sound Society. Born in London and now based in Dubai, Zarooni writes from a life spent moving between places, which perhaps explains why his music rarely stays neatly inside one genre.

NotSoHuman

Abdullah Al Shamsi may perform under the name NotSoHuman, but his route into music was surprisingly relatable. Born and raised in Abu Dhabi, the Emirati singer-songwriter taught himself guitar and piano through YouTube before a 2019 cover of Bruno Mars’ Talking to the Moon began attracting an audience online. Since then, he has turned those bedroom-cover beginnings into a career spanning pop, acoustic R&B, and jazz, releasing his debut original single Love It Up in 2023 and opening for Maroon 5 in Abu Dhabi the following year. With a smooth voice, multi-instrumental chops, and an audience built largely through social media, NotSoHuman represents a generation of Emirati musicians who didn’t wait around for a traditional music industry to discover them.

The Emirati Musicians You Need on Your Playlist

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