Wegz’s full-length debut, Aqareb, released earlier this year, left many fans with an itch to scratch. The record roamed across regions and genres through its collaborations and hybridized sound, pushing the Egyptian R&B savant into new territories and returning with auditory souvenirs from every trip. Yet that ambition came at a cost: Aqareb felt, at times, inexplicably estranged from Wegz’s origins, as if his local legacy had been temporarily set aside.
The answer to those critiques, the fans were told, was simple: wait for Side B. And a few days ago, our editors finally got a first taste of that promised second act with the long-anticipated Wegz-Mohamed Mounir collaboration, “Kalam Forsan.”
We received the press release before the listening link, and immediately took notice of the production credits: co-produced by Tudor Monroe and Hussein Gamal, the duo responsible for defining Side A’s sonic palette.
But “Kalam Forsan” belongs neither to Side A nor to any continuity with its production style. Where Side A leaned heavily into global and pan-African textures, favoring electronic modernity over acoustic warmth, this new collaboration is unmistakably Egyptian – down to the finest detail. The Eastern percussions, so polished they gleam, set the track’s atmosphere from the first beat and ground it in the aesthetic overlap that made a Wegz-Mounir pairing feel inevitable long before the song existed. A lush string section flirts with sporadic flashes of Hussein Gamal’s oud and Nader El Shaer’s liquid kawala lines – shimmering like a spotlight on Upper Egypt – widening the distance between this track and Side A’s sonic universe.
The song works best in the way its two poles meet almost perfectly at the midpoint. Mounir’s delivery, rich in internal rhymes, lands just inches away from rap territory, yet remains unmistakably Nubian, a thread running from his earliest beginnings in “Alemoony Eineky” decades ago to this year’s latest release, “Daye.”
Wegz, on the other hand, leans into an ’80s Egyptian easy-listening pop – smooth, textured, and sweet, like a cup of Nubian tea. The chemistry between them is so vivid you can almost taste it, defying the backstory that the session was planned in a single sitting, with little prior connection, and recorded separately. Their phrases cascade into one another, and there are moments when they trade lines so seamlessly that one finishes the other’s sentence with uncanny ease.
The only real cleavage lies in the lyrics: Wegz’s self-penned lines remain rooted in rap bravado, while Mounir’s soft-edged, folksy wisdom comes courtesy of veteran lyricist Amir Taema, with deep reflections on life and human nature, themes Mounir has consistently returned to throughout his career. Yet even here, their contrasts feel complementary – two accent variations of the same language.
Tudor Monroe’s contribution is the track’s quiet revelation. Where Side A saw him tugging Wegz outward into his own world, here the producer steps fully into Wegz’s terrain, working with a completely Eastern, fully acoustic toolkit. His approach to producing Oriental music relies on adding layers of studio sharpness, spatial depth, polish, and articulation – all foreign to ‘80s Egyptian pop, refurbishing the nostalgic sound with modern-day, cutting-edge engineering. Simultaneously, both Tudor and Wegz are pulled, almost unintentionally, into Mounir’s orbit, an artist who, by instinct or sheer force, bends every collaboration to his own nature.
If “Kalam Forsan” turns out to be a representative sample of Side B, then what awaits us is, branding aside, practically a new album. One that responds to the gaps and scratches the itches left by Side A. And perhaps what ultimately binds the two halves together won’t be sonic continuity but the broader arc they form: an expansion of Wegz’s horizons that never abandons his strongest suit. Aqareb, it turns out, is not done spelling its secrets – and it might just turn its shaky launch into the debut you’d come to expect from a musician who’s been defining Egyptian pop for just short of a decade.
