Music

Saudi Artist AL7AMDAN Enters His Cowboy Era With ‘HAWAJEES’

BYMille Team

September 29, 2026

A Saudi sheila and an American country song might sound like an unlikely match, but give it a minute and the connection starts to make sense. Both are built around storytelling, both give the voice and lyrics plenty of room, and neither necessarily needs a complicated melody to get its point across. That overlap is where Saudi artist and producer AL7AMDAN—born Mohammed Alhamdan— found the idea for his new track, HAWAJEES.

Set to drop on Oct. 1, the song starts with sheila, the Gulf musical tradition centered around poetry and vocals, before bringing country into the mix through live instrumentation and production that gives the familiar sound a completely different setting. The result is neither a country version of sheila nor an obvious mash-up of the two.

That was important to the Riyadh-born multidisciplinary creative. Instead of throwing two genres together and hoping for the best, he went looking for what they already had in common, from “melodic simplicity” to the importance of “the voice and the word” and, above all, storytelling.

With HAWAJEES, AL7AMDAN keeps the sheila as his starting point and changes almost everything around it. Country gives him another way into the form, while the track itself still feels unmistakably connected to the Gulf. As he puts it, the idea was to see whether sheila could “enter a new space” while remaining “Gulf at its core.”

The country influence makes its way into the music video, too, though AL7AMDAN gives the cowboy uniform a distinctly Gulf spin. At one point, he appears in cowboy boots with a sab7a in hand, a small styling detail that pretty much sums up the whole project.

It makes even more sense once you look at the 32-year-old’s work beyond this particular song. The Saudi singer, artist, and actor has never really stayed in one lane. He uses AL7AMDAN for music and production, 7amdan for contemporary art, design and creative direction, and Abu 7amdan for acting, singing, and performance.

His music has been similarly hard to box in. He produced Moayad’s Bash Muhandis in 2022, before appearing alongside Moayad and Egyptian rapper Lege-Cy on Ala El Hadi the following year. More recently, he has worked with artists including Freek, Ma-Beyn, The Hws, TUFF, and Arabian Alien, placing him within a generation of regional musicians who seem increasingly uninterested in sticking to neat genre categories.

That curiosity runs through his art, too. Alhamdan has pulled from Riyadh’s construction boom, Najdi chants and the rababa, finding new possibilities in sounds most people would simply take at face value. HAWAJEES keeps that curiosity going, this time drawing a line between the Gulf and country music that I certainly didn’t see coming. Maybe it’s the Calgary girl in me, but Saudi country was all I needed to hear. See you Oct. 1.

Saudi Artist AL7AMDAN Enters His Cowboy Era With ‘HAWAJEES’

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