Nearly eight years on from the release of her last album, singer-songwriter Maryam Saleh, who is one of most authentic and beloved voices in Egyptian music, is back with a new album. Entitled Syrr سِرّ, which means “secret” in Arabic, the record is set to be released on March 27th through Simsara Records. After a long break, Saleh has crafted an album that explores themes of memory, loss, and transformation. Syrr سِرّ is influenced by Egyptian and Arabic song forms, including the mawwal, lullaby, madih, muwashshah, and taqtuqa, and it was co-produced by Saleh, Maurice Louca, and Kamilya Jubran, following three years of songwriting, composition, and collaboration with Kamilya Jubran as mentor. Saleh describes the process of writing the album as a way to understand herself and the world around her:

“Writing, for me, was not merely inscription, but a way toward understanding. A search for a private pulse that could hold feeling before it dissolves into noise. Loss began as the first crack, then became a current of energy, and finally an echo that runs between the words— balancing what is spontaneous with what is deliberately remade. Three years of listening, returning, revising, breaking open the text and re-forming it until it revealed itself more clearly.”

Saleh has unveiled the album’s first single, ‘El Fetra الفطرة’, an introspective, powerful and poignant track where traditional Egyptian music forms like the taqtuqa are reimagined with “contemporary production aesthetics and instrumentation”. The single was written and composed by Saleh herself, with keys by Maurice Louca, cello by Zizi Ibrahim, drums by Dylan Hunter Chee Greene and and percussion by Joss Turnbull. Here it is.