Arabic scales and nu-metal converge in this Saudi Arabia-born Londoner’s unique brand of dance-pop
It’s a special sort of artist who can rope in one of the main men in UK jazz on a track that sounds like prog-metallers Tool and is about periods, but Alewya is a force to be reckoned with. That song is The Code, featuring jazz drummer extraordinaire Moses Boyd, in which Alewya’s frustration about a heavy flow became a meditation on her Ethiopian-Egyptian ancestry. She delivers her refined yet ravey dance-pop with the attitude of Aaliyah, the cool of a be-shaded Neo from The Matrix and a whole lot of “twisted Firestartaaaar” energy.
The past year has been impossibly tough for breaking artists, but Alewya (pronounced “Ah-le-wee-ya”) has been gradually building buzz with her ancestral club bangers. There was Jagna, which made it on to Annie Mac’s Radio 1 show this year; Sweating, a shadowy, sultry track, drawing on dancehall and reggaeton rhythms and trap’s haunted instrumentals; and Alewya’s latest single Spirit_X, on which she raps over a classy drum’n’bass beat.