Last year, while Gen Z’s first generation of A-list pop stars started to take over charts and streaming platforms across the region, Amr Diab was due to release his first album with Sony. It seemed like the perfect moment for the megastar to shake up his formula and start exploring more contemporary styles in keeping with a younger generation and its new competitors. Hence the title, Ebtadena (We Began): a new label, a new chapter, a new generation to serenade.
And boy, oh, boy, did the album land. Singles like “Khatafoony” and “Baba” sparked the frenzied virality you’d expect from the King of Arab Pop. The electro-pop-forward sound resonated with Gen Z as much as it did with millennials delighted to see their lifetime star under a new light.
Amr Diab returns in July 2026 with his second album on the label, almost a year later. Titled Habeitek, it arrives at an awkward moment in Egyptian pop’s history, one where the airwaves are dominated by Y2K aesthetics and, more awkwardly, by Amr Diab interpolations. The megastar would have been excused if, in a moment of generational confusion, he asked himself: “So, to keep up with the younger generation, I should slide back into my old self now?”
The new album seems to answer this logic. If a new generation is demanding music that sounds like Amr Diab’s ’90s and ’00s catalogue, who better to serve it to them than Amr Diab himself?
Habeitek begins the same way Ebtadena did last year, with its boldest offering first. Ebtadena opened with “Khatafoony,” a pop number that saw him teaming up with his daughter Jana while making room for a cheeky rap verse in English. Amr Diab himself noted that the song’s viral success last year owed no small part to his daughter’s fluency in Gen Z pop.
Similarly, Habeitek opens with “Lola El Banat,” a vivid electro-pop track that blends reggaeton with a beat and melody inspired by folkloric Egyptian rural music, an homage to Amr Diab’s own family roots in the largely rural Sharqia governorate, in a way that recalls the single “Baba” from Ebtadena, which in turn borrowed samples and textures from the music folklore of Upper Egypt. And just like “Khatafoony,” the internet welcomed “Lola El Banat” as a summer hit that effortlessly took over streaming platforms and social media.
Unlike Ebtadena, and with the exception of the house-leaning “Salam Kebeer,” Amr Diab ditches the contemporary electronic sound he explored on the previous album and slides wholeheartedly back into his ’90s and ’00s mode. Instrumental salsa, flamenco, bossa nova, and Y2K pop wrapped in shaabi beats – these genres define 10 of the album’s 12 songs.
Those songs rarely disappoint, but just as rarely give you something to write home about, especially in terms of vocal performance, instrumentation, composition, or production. The title track “Habeitek” leans on Amr Diab’s tried and tested flamenco instinct, traditional acoustic guitar-led instrumentation, and Amr Mostafa’s seasoned composition, whose credit spans two other songs on the album. Composer Ehab Abdelwahed contributes two more, including the sleeper hit “Wenty Ganby,” which juggles turn-of-the-century Egyptian pop tropes with a veteran’s ease.
A better way of looking at the album is by grouping the songs according to their lyricists. For one, Diab expands his collaboration with viral-hit-making lyricist Mostafa Hadouta from one song on Ebtadena to three on Habeitek, including the viral “El Alwan,” whose traction owes a lot to its TikTok-tailored lyrics, and which sparked mild controversy over its flirtatious words, turning it into a half-meme, half-viral moment on short-video platforms.
Another standout is the album’s anonymous lyricist Rozam, credited on two of its most memorable songs: the breezy “Getlak” and the banger closer “Eta’akhar Etabna.” “Getlak” in particular has been wildly celebrated as the album’s best track, riding a sitting maqsoum beat and airy instrumentation, its words carrying the pull of a seasoned, classic hand. That hand, it turned out, belonged to no anonymous poet at all: Rozam was unmasked as Turki Al Sheikh, chairman of Saudi Arabia’s General Entertainment Authority, once an official Supreme Council of Culture document surfaced and Al Sheikh confirmed the credit himself.
The release of Habeitek has also resurfaced the debate around the use of AI in contemporary Arab music. Three of the album’s creatives, sound engineer Amir Mahrous, composer Ehab Abdelwahed, and music video director Liam Allam, all admitted to at least some use of AI while contributing to the album, reportedly with Diab’s own blessing. Other contributors have been criticized loudly by online commentators for alleged use of AI, only to deny it just as loudly.
What’s remarkable is that the debate didn’t center on the ethics or authenticity of AI in general, but on the sense that here, in this album in particular, its use has cheapened the work. Commentators pointing to the popular software Suno argued that parts of the instrumentation and sound design felt thinner and out of character for an artist of Amr Diab’s status.
While it stands at a distance from the forward thinking that defined Ebtadena’s best moments, Habeitek still comes across as an adequate sequel in Diab’s new Sony era. A rejuvenated megastar, awakened by a new generation and its emerging pop stars, is meeting his younger audience wherever they are, whether they’re chasing Western synth-driven electronic pop or high on nostalgia for Diab’s own early career. He’s here to deliver the summer’s best-performing album either way.
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