Band of the week: Maii Waleed

It’s been six months since singer songwriter Maii Waleed dropped her debut EP, “Moga.” The album’s already been written about. But that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be written about more. Because the beauty of Waleed’s music is that keeps you coming back time and time again. With each round of listening, something new can be discovered in her sonic sphere — a new sound, a distant chord, a reverbed guitar line, an unchartered emotion. 

Produced by Lebanese underground music magnate Zeid Hamdan, “Moga” continues to reverberate through my mind even when I’m not actually listening to the songs. Maybe it’s because Waleed is emblematic of the continual state of lonerism felt by many solo artists, so her words and vocal timber resonate deeply with lonely-hearted listeners. While there are tracks on the EP that feel a bit over-polished, divergent from Waleed’s self-produced demos like the eponymous track “Moga” and “Neptune”, overall the seamless pairing of Hamdan and Alexandria native Waleed was a major leap forward for the 25-year-old artist’s career trajectory.

The album is a euphonious concoction of dream-pop, anachronistic tracks with glitch-electronic twists and turns slammed against stubborn rock riffs, and a whole lot of synths. But where the Hamdan-Waleed combination truly succeeds is in the deconstruction and reconstruction of the limitations of solo artistry, in songs like “Al-Amar al-Gedeed” (The New Moon) and “Eswed Ramadi” (Grey-Black). Hamdan adds just the right amount of sonic phrasing to enable the young artist’s music to transcend SoundCloud headphone hits and become a complete Arabic dream-pop story.

Waleed is currently in the process of recording a second EP with her band, Mai Waleed and the Blue Fish.