MARYAM SALEH - Syrr

It took three years to bring “Syrr” to completion. A geological era, given the schizophrenia with which so much of the music around us is now released. Yet a mere blink of an eye for Egyptian artist Maryam Saleh, who, to unveil her “secret” — “syrr” in Arabic, precisely — let the fractures within her widen further, then mapped them across the nine songs of an album also inspired by various strictly Middle Eastern musical and poetic forms such as mawwāl, madih, muwashshah and taqtuqa.

“Writing, for me, is a path toward understanding. A search for an inner pulse capable of holding a feeling before it dissolves into noise. Loss began first as a crack, then became a current of energy, and finally an echo running through the words, balanced between what is spontaneous and what is deliberately reconstructed. Three years of listening, returns, revisions, breaking down the text and reformulating it, until everything revealed itself more clearly,” Saleh recounts.

Co-produced by Maryam Saleh herself alongside her trusted collaborator Maurice Louca and Palestinian singer-songwriter Kamilya Jubran, who play keyboards, oud and backing vocals respectively, “Syrr” finds in the latter its guiding muse. Hers is a presence behind the scenes, but also a decidedly important one in terms of co-production, for a musician like Saleh who has been used since childhood to interacting with larger figures, having grown up in an artistic environment strongly shaped by her father, theatre director Saleh Saad.

Between rhythms typical of Egyptian tradition that often creep in on tiptoe almost everywhere — as in the tantric “Wanas” — and whispered realizations that then expand into melancholic crescendos (above all on the opening “Mawdou' Tani”), “Syrr” also makes room for songs written entirely by Jubran alone, such as the tormented “El Faqd”, or penned four-handed (“Ma'na”, “Nafas”, “Alb” and “Khayal”), reinforcing a bond that transcends generational boundaries. And it is precisely in these shared moments that the two singer-songwriters shine brightest. One example? The seraphic “Alb”, whose lyrics form a poem on the soul's ups and downs, set against guitar lines winding in the background and sudden harmonic openings.

In the more solitary episodes, such as “El Fetra”, the arrangement instead turns vaguely contemporary, complete with a bed of electronics in the second half of the track, while the lyrics once again point to an emotional cataclysm mixed with a hidden urge to start over.

Unlike other works so warmly received on this side of the world, such as “I Remember I Forget” by Lebanese artist Yasmine Hamdan, “Syrr” doesn't look to the future by blending the tradition of its homeland with more recent or well-established Western genres, but instead remains largely anchored to its own borders, joining past and present without any self-indulgence or pop-leaning winks. The result is a stylistically cohesive album, conceived also as a poetic fresco with sorrowful undertones — one to be contemplated without shedding a single tear, dancing and singing among the stars of the Nile.

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15/06/2026