Standing at the end of one of Arab pop’s busiest summers, it’s becoming clear that the genre is caught in a strange generational exchange. Younger artists are reaching backwards, borrowing heavily from the sounds and aesthetics of those who came before them, while established stars are looking forward, trying to speak to younger audiences and absorb their language.
The result can sometimes feel like both generations are reaching for something that no longer entirely belongs to them. Meanwhile, artists coming from different native genres keep shifting towards pop, without necessarily understanding the mechanics of making a pop record.
Saint Levant’s Afandi is as serious an attempt as any at resolving these tensions. It’s a record that speaks pop as a first language, not an awkwardly-acquired one. And it looks at different generations of Arab pop not as independent domains of influence, but as overlapping eras of the same timeless sound.
Across its twelve tracks, fully produced by Souhail Guesmi, also known as Ratchopper, the album dives headfirst into pop, with Saint Levant finally fully transcending his hip-hop roots. Although this direction has been taking shape gradually across his recent work, Afandi feels like the final sentence in a multi-chapter journey.
The record leans heavily into traditional Arab pop territory, whether through its musical structures, themes, stories or sound. Much of the album feels like a reminiscence of the past, borrowing signatures from the tarab era, chaabi, rai, and Egyptian-Lebanese Y2K pop.
Yet the album remains remarkably cohesive, with love and longing, regret and unanswered questions threading their way through the record. Even as it moves between genres, the transitions feel instinctive when the album is heard in sequence; as the sequencing gives Afandi the continuity it needs, allowing its different influences to exist within the same world without making each song feel like an isolated musical reference.
The album opens with a pre-released hit that already counts as one of Saint Levant’s biggest numbers, “Sabah El Ward,” a song that leans heavily into the instrumental language of classic tarab, built around sweeping strings, choral vocals and takht percussion. Its sentimental lyrics complete the picture, carrying the warmth and stillness of a bright morning in an Arab city.
In a year defined by the full-scale arrival of interpolation as a trend shaping modern Arab pop, “Sabah El Ward” chose to offer its own spin on the trend.
While the song indeed sparked endless speculations about its source of influence upon release, rarely have two commenters named the same alleged reference track, attributing the song’s timeless Arab pop sound to over a couple of dozens of potential references spanning songs from the late ‘80s to the late-2000s, before audiences arrived to an unpronounced conclusion that while the song draws heavily from past eras in Arab pop, it is not found guilty of lifting parts and pieces directly from specific previous hits. The same goes for other songs on the album, which spark a wide-ranging sense of nostalgia without regurgitating any specific releases.
“Sabah El Ward” is far from the only song on Afandi to embrace this more traditional instrumentation. The album almost divides itself into two halves: one that looks backwards, drawing heavily from older Arab sounds, and another that moves more decisively into contemporary, global pop.
“Leil El Sahraneen,” the album’s second track, belongs firmly to the former. It carries the same instrumental weight while leaning further into Egyptian chaabi, recalling the music that filled Egypt’s folksy soundscape throughout the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s, just before mahraganat gradually began taking over. “Cinderella” keeps that same momentum, but the song itself can be divided in two halves. The first stays in classic Arab music, while the second, driven by harder percussion hits, begins to draw more directly from stadium pop and Latin pop.
And it feels almost intentional that the second half of “Cinderella” is what opens the door to the album’s more modern sounds. It leads directly into “Mitsubish” and “Maskara,” the only two features on the album, bringing in two of the biggest names in Lebanese and Palestinian pop: Haifa Wehbe and Mohamed Assaf.
“Mitsubishi” plays it smart. It has a catchy chorus, verses and bridges that are immediately easy to repeat and digest, all wrapped in a distinctly modern production driven by Ratchopper’s kicks, punchy percussion and keyboard chords that barely shift throughout the track. Of course, Haifa’s name alone gives the feature considerable heft, but it’s the easy vocal dialogue between the two artists that makes the song particularly relevant.
Then “Maskara” dives fully into dabke, from its sampled intro straight into the track itself. It comes in with relentless energy, a high tempo and heavy use of synthetic keyboard chords. The song particularly benefits from the album’s avoidance of the hit-maker-maximalist mindset that defined much of Arab pop this year, validating Saint Levant’s preference to work with producers and lyricists who feel close to his desired sound, regardless of their hit-making record. The song’s fresh arrangement and seamless lyrics stand as two quite achievements of this direction.
From there, Afandi grows increasingly Y2K in its sensibilities. “So What” and “Monaya” settle into the territory of early-2000s Egyptian and Lebanese pop, before “Masla7jiya” pulls the record further south, drawing heavily from Latin pop and, in particular, reggaeton.
“Sahran W Nasi” then arrives with a full-blown rai charge, recalling the unmistakable sound of 1990s rai, particularly the work of Cheb Hasni and Cheb Rezki. “Wardeh” pulls the record back toward the classic Arab pop era, while “Hawa” makes the album’s circle almost complete, returning to the sound world of its opening tracks, built around the traditional instrumentation of the takht.
Then comes “Rayeh Wein,” a new turn for Saint Levant, closing the album with flamenco. Yet even here, the guitars and strings remain restrained, almost as if deliberately kept beneath the surface. There is no grand final flourish. Instead, the subdued instrumentation leaves Afandi suspended in a hazy, dreamlike state, allowing the album to drift quietly to its end.
One thing worth noticing in the songwriting is the contrast in how Afandi approaches love. Deeply shaped by Jordanian singer and lyricist Idreesi, who holds co-writing credit across most of the album’s 12 songs – some of Afandi’s songs remain bright, playful and flirtatious, carrying the charm and confidence that have long been part of the Saint Levant persona, particularly in the collaborations with Haifa and Assaf.
But across a handful of others, love takes on a far more pessimistic shape, presented as something unattainable, fractured or already slipping away. These songs ask why a lover left, long for something that can no longer be recovered, or return to questions left unanswered after a relationship ends.
That contrast is worth recognizing when looking at the context of Saint Levant’s earlier work. It’s true, his previous works did tackle vulnerability, but Afandi is more willing to sit with it. Its mellow, often bluesy moments, particularly as the album moves toward its final stretch, give us a Saint Levant who seems to be growing older, becoming more transparent with himself and less interested in hiding behind the persona.
Afandi makes a visible effort to drift further away from the performative macho posturing of the man who pretends not to care, constantly placing himself above everyone else; and tries, instead, to approach love with more sincerity, never shying away from immense infatuation, vulnerability, or even the simple enjoyment of pursuing someone’s affection.
At its core, Afandi is a textbook pop album in the best sense of the word: structured, accessible, melodic and built around actual pop songs. Where so much of the region’s output borrows pop’s surface, Afandi understands its underlying mechanics. It has hooks, choruses, features, replay value and, most importantly, genuine pop hits. Its chart performance is not a measure of artistic quality on its own, but neither should its mass appeal be dismissed. For a record made by a pop star, reaching a mass audience is part of the equation.
And at a moment when both generations of Arab pop seem to be reaching for what isn’t quite theirs, Afandi finds a far more convincing middle ground. Its production is modern and its songwriting is built for the present, but its musical vocabulary is deeply informed by what Arab pop has sounded like across generations. It understands the thin line between influence and imitation, and spends much of the album walking it with remarkable ease.
