There’s no clean way to describe what Ino Casablanca makes. The melodies pull one way, the rhythms another. The lyrics sit somewhere between confession and distance. The first time you hear it, you spend the opening minute trying to place it – digital raï, arabo-andalusian echoes, shatta, something borrowed from funk. You don’t land anywhere. And then, slowly, you stop trying.
Adam, alias Ino Casablanca, twenty-five years old, is nominated among the male revelations at the Victoires de la Musique 2026, has two projects released in under a year, and shows selling out across France. He could ride the wave. He doesn’t ride the wave.
Nowhere, Everywhere
It starts with a word: Tamara
In Darija, it spills past its dictionary definition: it’s the sweat on the back of your neck at the Ceuta border crossing in August, the silence of a packed car on the drive back from vacation, the father coming home in the evening, eyes hollow. Adam chose that word for his second project – a word that those who know it recognize on first breath, and that everyone else has to learn to feel before they can understand it.
Tamara came out in January 2025 without an announcement or a campaign. One or two singles dropped into the void, then the project all at once – ten tracks, a few weeks of lead time, and that was it. That refusal to translate, to smooth things out for easier consumption – it runs through everything Ino Casablanca has built since. Extasia, his third project, arrived in October 2025, ten tracks again. Neither EP nor album. “My music isn’t going to make sense as a single. You have to take on the whole project.”
What you hear in his music resists definition. Not rap – or at least, not only. Not chanson in any classical sense, even if the melodies come dangerously close sometimes. Rhythms develop independently of the lyrics. A universe that’s intensely personal yet never narrowly autobiographical.
“Across a discography, I could rap on 25 tracks and sing on 32 others. What does that make me? How do you figure that out?” On both sides, the same mistake – those who insist on filing him under rap, and those who refuse just as firmly to let him be a rapper at all. “People aren’t always comfortable with nuance.”
In a French landscape that likes its artists legible and its genres airtight, that ambiguity is indeed uncomfortable. Yet for Ino, it’s simply the reflection of a trajectory where borders have always been suggestions.
To understand where this sound comes from, you have to go back to Vilafranca, just outside Barcelona. He grew up there until he was eight, in an in-between that most people can’t inhabit without turning it into something – neither quite Spanish nor quite Moroccan, both at once and separately depending on the day. That’s where he learned to listen without sorting.
The Spanish scene is part of his interior landscape in ways that tend to be underestimated. What this generation is producing right now – across indie rock, rap, pure pop – comes as much from a reclaimed sense of cultural pride as from an approach to production inherited from Americans.
Rusowsky sounds deeply Latin in his palette but approaches music with a very American methodical rigor. Judeline, whom everyone is watching, embodies the same movement – something identity-rooted, carried without being turned into a statement. Ino grew up inside that double register without ever having to choose between them. That dual fluency runs through everything he builds – including how he works with the people around him.
“You embrace what you actually love, simply. And if people think it’s embarrassing, that’s their problem.”
For him, that way of working with collaborators is a conviction. He thinks of Kanye hunting down Tim Holland for a specific kick because nobody else had that particular color. “If someone has a color, it’s win-win for everyone.” Far from delegation, this is a certainty about what music can do when you stop rationing it.
Navigating Cultural Limbo
Before twenty, you absorb. You don’t filter yet – influences come from everywhere without being asked where they’re from, and they take up permanent residence. After, something shifts. You refine, dig, go deeper. You grab a thread and pull, follow it to the root. Sometimes you find that something from 1990 hits harder than anything released last week. That quiet obsession – that tunnel you go down with an artist, an era, a sound – is the mark of ears that eventually produce something irreplaceable.
The Maghrebi inheritance operated differently, in a less chosen, deeper way. The references that circulate inside an Arab family form a sonic backdrop you didn’t select, and that engraves itself in your ear anyway. And with it comes, for most Arab children growing up in Europe, a phase you know without ever naming it: rejection.
Suppressing what you love because you’re afraid it’ll be used against you – the West had turned this culture into a punchline before helping itself to it without permission, while the artists themselves had no legal structures to protect what they’d made. Najat Aatabou sampled by Chemical Brothers. Manu Dibango sampled by Michael Jackson. The Megri Brothers reworked by Boney M. The list is long. The injustice, quiet.
“When you’re in Europe, those cultures get completely disrespected. And you’re scared of being discriminated against because of it, so you try to suppress it a bit. And as you get older, you realize you’ve been suppressing things in a way that’s really, genuinely damaging.”
Then comes the return. “You embrace what you actually love, simply. And if people think it’s embarrassing, that’s their problem.”
That reembracing doesn’t look like a political declaration. It looks like someone who has made peace with their own ears. And it’s from that peace – not from strategy, nor from calculation – that a sound emerges that no one else produces in quite the same way.
“(Labels) don’t know how to develop artists anymore. They don’t take anyone from the ground up.”
The most revealing reference Ino cites isn’t contemporary, it’s Hasni – the king of sentimental raï, assassinated in 1994 on the streets of Oran at thirty-two years old, at the peak of what he was building. A man who recorded over twelve hundred cassettes in his short life, so quickly and so relentlessly that many of his recordings still haven’t been catalogued today. According to Ino, Hasni didn’t wonder how his music would be received. He didn’t try to fit into a category. He broke genre boundaries in his very process – and he paid the price for it.
“He had the reflection. He had the message. He had the way of making music.”
That’s recognition of kinship, and the parallel with the cassette era says something broader: in the Arab world of the ’80s and ’90s, the cassette changed everything because it made it possible to create and distribute without going through the gatekeepers. To record an album, you had to be discovered, have someone at the top say yes. With the cassette, you needed no one. It’s on cassette that raï touched electro, funk and jazz. It’s on cassette that entire artists existed without the industry knowing or wanting it.
Ino belongs to that same logic – and while the tools have changed, the conviction is identical: music that wasn’t formatted to please before it existed.
On cross-pollination, he’s measured but certain: “Right now there are very few artists in France working this way – but that’s going to change. At some point it’ll be so normal that it won’t even be something worth pointing out about my music.”
He watches the Moroccan scene with admiration edged with distance. He remembers the moment the type beat culture changed everything over there – that glitch in the matrix that gave rise to a generation of strong rappers, ones capable of drawing the attention of the French scene around the time of the Safar project. He put a foot in that world himself with Draganov on “Moula Solitude.” But Ino doesn’t belong to that scene any more than he belongs to any other. He’s from everywhere and nowhere at once – and that position, one he didn’t seek, has become his signature.
A Deal He Can Refuse
When labels come up in our conversation, he doesn’t hold back. “They don’t know how to develop artists anymore. They don’t take anyone from the ground up. They wait for things to take off on their own – and then what exactly do they bring?”
That’s not the posture of an independent artist romanticizing the struggle. It’s a lucid diagnosis of an industry that prefers to wait for independent artists to prove themselves before stepping in to claim a share. “There are artists who are bridled into doing certain things. And it’s not them. It disgusts them.” The paradox is that independent artists always end up making their mark. “Always, always, always.”
“People aren’t always comfortable with nuance.”
The visual work extends all of this with the same interior logic. Ino has known Toxine, his director, since high school – though it took time before he asked him to collaborate. “When it’s your friend, you don’t want them to feel obligated.” References flow in both directions without needing to be named: Damien Chazelle for certain movements, La Haine for others, Lalaland in particular framing choices.
“My music, when you don’t know me, it can create confusion about who I am.” The visual doesn’t simplify or answer but orients, without closing anything off.
At the Victoires de la Musique, performing on national television, he had a choice of what to play. He chose “Bissap du 20ème” – the track he considers most representative of Extasia’s identity. Its title alone cuts through: a Senegalese drink, a Parisian arrondissement, a life that doesn’t fit a single narrative.
On a medium that still reaches the less connected, the more exposed to misinformation, it lands differently. This is another image of immigration – not the one manufactured through the political exploitation of news events, not a country looking at itself in the wrong mirror. Not a raised fist. A song. “It divides us for nothing. On every side.”
What weighs on him isn’t the injustice itself – it’s the waste. All that collective energy spent on separation instead of stopping to look at what actually deserves attention.
In concert, he chooses human-scale venues and accessible ticket prices. He sees faces and plays for people he can look at – and that thing, once lost, isn’t easily recovered. There’s something in this way of building that recalls what Nass El Ghiwane did in their time – redirecting the money from television appearances into parties organized in villages, channeling back into the community what the institutions gave. Ino Casablanca may not use that vocabulary, but the logic is the same.
Nominated among the revelations at the Victoires, sold-out shows, a press that’s taken notice. I ask him when he first felt like an artist.
“The moment you create, you’re an artist. People don’t have to know about it.”
He says it without irony. He says it because it’s what he genuinely believes – that external validation comes later, by accident, if ever, and that music would exist anyway. That conviction isn’t new. It predates the projects, the sold-out dates, the Victoires. It goes back to when he was doing everything alone in his room, not showing anyone, “out of shyness” – because he wasn’t yet proud enough of what he was making.
What Ino Casablanca is building, through Tamara and then Extasia, is the demonstration that an identity scattered across several cultures, several languages, several ways of hearing isn’t a complicated starting point to manage. It’s raw material. The kind that produces a sound no one else can replicate, because you have to have lived inside several worlds simultaneously to know, instinctively, how to make them coexist without betraying any of them.
Tamara had a word for the sweat and the grind. Extasia knew how to make music out of it. What comes next belongs to those who listened early enough.
