Zeyne

Zein Sajdi was born in Amman into a Palestinian-Jordanian musical family. Her father collected records. Her mother was an amateur singer and led a dabke troupe, a type of traditional dance that is very popular in the Arab Mediterranean countries. And her sister was a pianist. She graduated with the intention of pursuing a career in media, but her story had already been written with a different plot: during the pandemic, she began uploading videos to her Instagram account doing covers of other people’s songs and it wasn’t long before she officially became zeyne.

Her story seeps into her music, which sounds the way it does because of her family background but also because of her geopolitical context. Her contemporary R&B operates in a space similar to that of Anglo-Saxon artists such as Sudan Archives and Empress Of, but her songs are imbued with both the musical tradition and the suffering of the Palestinian people. “You can’t separate what’s happening in Palestine from how I move through the world, how I think or how I create, and the weight this carries is constant, just like the pain, the anger and the helplessness,” she has said in an interview.

Following her appearance at the ACT X PALESTINE charity concert, zeyne will come back to Barcelona on 16th September to present AWDA - عودة, her debut album, at the Sala Apolo.