The Music Industry Can’t Silence Nemahsis
The Palestinian-Canadian artist was left stranded by her label after the October 7 attacks last year. Now she’s expanding the idea of what a pop star can be.
In March, Nemah Hasan booked a flight from her home outside Toronto to go see her grandmother in Palestine. Israel was five months into bombing Gaza following Hamas’ October 7 assault, and the unrelenting images of Palestinian death had plunged the singer into despair. “I was like a robot; I was so depressed. I didn’t feel human,” she says. “I felt like a fraud not stepping foot over there.”
She says she had been dropped by her record label in the immediate wake of Hamas’ ambush, and she was contemplating what to do with Verbathim, her nearly-completed debut album as Nemahsis. One option, she thought, was to never release it at all. Yet the 30-year-old musician just kept working, spending her savings on making music videos at a fever pitch—refusing to let the music industry beat her. A few days after those shoots were done, Hasan and her mother and sister were on a plane bound for Jordan, through which they had to travel by foot for two days to reach Jericho, in the West Bank.
The West Bank is run by the Palestinian Authority, not Hamas. But Israeli military and settlers have been attacking cities there, too, under the rationale of targeting armed militants. In Jericho, amid strife and peril, Hasan felt a healing solidarity. “Even with the dangerous moments that were happening—bombs being sent over, or kids being shot in the street, it was like I was experiencing that with them,” she recalls. “My life was no better than theirs.” When her grandmother was too afraid to go to the market, Hasan picked up the groceries for her. “I was scared,” she says, “but what if those are our last few hours, and we didn’t get to eat the meal we wanted to eat?”
Hasan hadn’t intended to film a video while she was in Jericho—the trip was meant to recalibrate herself, to revel in the love of family—but her manager, Chass Bryan, encouraged her to do it. She was reluctant, and challenged him to find her a director of photography in Palestine within 48 hours. Even though Bryan doesn’t speak Arabic, he rang her back 25 minutes later, with a filmmaker named Aram ready to go.
The concept for the “Stick of Gum” video is to show Hasan’s family and other Palestinians as they live—a counter to the dehumanization of Islamophobia and of genocide. Her grandmother makes a cameo; giggling neighborhood kids run alongside Hasan in the street, a posse of joy. The mere fact of these images—soundtracked by her exultant song about all the times she was told she’d have a hit if someone less Palestinian, less Muslim, less hijabi were delivering it—is enough to make you cry.
“I just want to show you what I saw there is beauty,” Hasan says. “Some people didn’t know about Palestine before last October, and all they’ve ever seen us is under the rubble. They didn’t see that we could just be on scooters, that we could just be enjoying some food with family. I wanted to show that part and humanize them—us—for a couple minutes.”
At the end of the daylong shoot, Aram returned home through the maze of checkpoints that separate towns in the West Bank, accidentally taking the Super 8 footage with him. Hasan, who was going back to Canada the next day, embarked with her mother on a desperate journey to retrieve the film. While they were at Aram’s office, news came that Iran was sending over rockets into Israel, and they had to return to Jericho immediately.
The border line was long, and the Israelis guarding it were pointing their guns at drivers and passengers. But eventually, they made it back to Jericho, where the family was kept awake by the sound of bombs. Hasan’s mother worried the border to Jordan would be closed, and they’d be stuck—it had happened to her before, for eight months, when she was pregnant with Nemah’s sister. But when they set out the next morning, everything was normal. It was like nothing had happened.
Hasan grew up on an 11-acre farm in Milton, Ontario, and even as a kid she needed to think about self-reliance. She and her siblings, second-generation Palestinian-Canadians all, spent their summers subsistence farming, raising and killing and freezing animals in order to make enough food for the winter. She was bullied in school for a lifestyle necessitated by poverty: “You have to cut your own firewood? Gross,” her peers would taunt.
But she learned useful skills like canning vegetables and making cheese and plucking wild jute leaves from the side of the road so her mother could make mulukhiyah, a savory vegetable dish served over rice. Most of her youth on the farm was hard work, but not all. One winter, her father, who owned a construction company, dug out some of the earth to make his children an ad hoc ice-skating rink; after-school tobogganing became her answer to watching TV.
“The best word to describe me is ‘sheltered,’” she tells me one August afternoon in Brooklyn, “but I don’t depend on a lot of people or tools or unnecessary things. I’m just like, ‘Use your imagination.’” Besides, as an adult, knowing the kinds of life skills they just don’t teach much anymore has made her indispensable among big-city types. “I get invited to camping trips just because I’m the one that knows how to start a bonfire,” she laughs. “Don’t be the coolest or the smartest—be the one that’s the most resourceful.”
Resourcefulness and imagination have proven valuable for Hasan’s career as Nemahsis. The sharp-minded singer and songwriter’s album, Verbathim, which she finally released last month, is a mellifluous and deeply felt snapshot of her life over the past few years, looking at depression and nostalgia, insecurity and resurgence, and emotional growth.
Broader in scope than her 2022 EP Eleven Achers, Verbathim’s surprising, varied palette is reflected in all those videos she filmed. There is “Coloured Concrete,” a pearlescent anthem inspired by the lack of central heating in her family home growing up, which has her doing the snake in a diaphanous dress beneath a floury storm. There is “ Spinning Plates,” a haunting dirge of love, with Nemahsis crafting pottery in Truffautian black-and-white. There is “You Wore It Better,” a fraught self-esteem song on a tuft of pianos, with Hasan singing on her farm and wearing a Canada sweatshirt she got in junior high because it looked cool on a friend.
On “Furniture Killer,” a power-lullaby with a biting chorus and dreamily flanged guitar, Nemahsis interrogates the subjectivity of perception—about how “there is a level of freedom that you reach by letting go of everything, whether forcibly or by choice,” she says. In conversation, she describes the song through the lens of her lineage—she comes from Palestinian Bedouins, an indigenous nomadic people now displaced and partly confined to the West Bank by Israel—and offers a long meditation on the pity that some feel towards unhoused people.
The record bends her vocal range on pensive dirges and pure, heart-bursting pop, buoying her raspy mezzo-soprano across overdriven guitars and electronic embellishments. Her voice is a ray of light amid the quagmire, and her song concepts are multi-dimensional, with themes that are freewheeling yet meditative and profound. It’s the kind of big-idea, big-sound album that should make her one of those alt-pop stars that labels promote everywhere, her searching brown eyes gleaming back at you from magazine pages and television screens.
Yet despite her large social media following—1.2 million on TikTok, 430,000 on Insta—and her experience touring the world with Eleven Achers, she’s been working independently since October 10, 2023. That’s when, Hasan says, her label dropped her, allegedly telling her manager that since Hasan is a Palestinian artist, they know where her loyalty lies. Yet, according to Hasan, the label called back hours later, begging her manager to let them rectify their fuck-up; he told them they would never speak to his client again. (Hasan has declined to name the label publicly. Hearing Things made multiple attempts to independently contact the label, but requests for comment were not returned.)
It was three days after Hamas broke through the Iron Wall enclosing Gaza and struck nearby kibbutzim and a trance music festival, killing some 1,200 people. Less than a week before, as a gesture of support, she said the label flacks had put a booming Palestinian song on the stereo of a Los Angeles boardroom where she was to sign her contract—something Hasan, whose music aligns with Western pop and indie rock, found weird. But after October 7, she says, that all changed.
She’d stayed quiet for a few days as she processed the news and gathered her thoughts; she adds that she hadn’t yet posted anything on social media when the label dropped her. In a changed global landscape, her music had become politicized simply because of who she is. On October 17, she posted a video of herself singing Lorde’s “Team” spliced with news clips of beautiful Palestine skylines (“we live in cities you’ll never see onscreen”) and rubble left in the wake of Israeli destruction, where more than 10,000 bodies are now believed to be trapped (“livin’ in ruins of a palace within my dreams”). The song was forever recontextualized, Nemahsis’ crystal a cappella entwined with the fate and strength of Palestinian citizens, and her video was shared tens of thousands of times, including by Bella Hadid and Lorde herself.
The experience of being dropped is still bewildering to her, and since then, she says she’s taken meeting after meeting with labels and distributors who have declined to work with her or reneged on deals. “I can handle it, I’m cool, I’ve made a stance”—that Palestine, occupied and established as an apartheid state by Israel, should be free. “I don’t want to be at a place that isn’t pro-My Life,” she says.
A year has passed; dreams have been upended. Israel has killed over 40,000 Gazans—though recent estimates by U.S. and British medical professionals put the number between 118,000 and 186,000—and at least 690 Palestinians in the West Bank. At least 10,627 of those killed were children, and the entire region—homes, schools, hospitals—has been leveled. The Israeli government is increasingly confronted with protests from its own citizens for its refusal to agree to a ceasefire and seeming indifference to Israeli hostages in Gaza. The state has begun bombing and invading Lebanon as well as the West Bank. On October 6, 2024, Nemahsis reprised her “Team” a cappella in Chicago, at a benefit concert for Gaza, and the audience sang along with her.
Hasan is sure and steady, but her seriousness is cut through with a sense of curiosity and occasionally dark humor; at one point she giggles and goads me, mom-like, for not finishing my salad. (The salad was big as hell.) We met midday in downtown Brooklyn, where she appeared with giant can headphones over her ballcap over her hijab. She’s a breeze of energy and acerbic wit—when I say I’m excited to talk about her music, she quips cheerfully, “You’re one of the only ones”—and we stroll to a French restaurant. She speaks in a rapid and thoughtful clip, the ideas spilling out because someone is listening, and making music is her lifeline.
Hasan didn’t grow up hearing a lot of music at home. Her father was religiously strict. But when he left for work, her mother blasted her cassettes by Arabic artists like the Lebanese icon Fairuz, and the family sang along. For years, Hasan didn’t think she had a voice worth listening to—a seventh-grade music teacher rejected her after a choir audition, for reasons that now seem extraneous to her voice—so she kept her level to a hum. She thought her friends and family were lying to her about her beautiful voice until she was 17, when a kindly music teacher overheard her in the hallway and beseeched her to perform in the high school talent show. He introduced her to the music of Amy Winehouse, which made her realize that pop musicians could have raspy voices like hers.
She began studying her favorite musicians—Winehouse and Adele, but also Daniel Johnston, Fiona Apple, and Marina and the Diamonds—analyzing how they transition musically from one emotion to another. In her late 20s, she began writing songs of her own. A few years earlier, she was diagnosed as being on the autism spectrum, and she describes her songwriting process as tending toward the analytical and exacting. Hasan first began recording her own songs in 2018, and her debut single, “What if I Took It Off for You?,” went viral, soundtracking more than 400,000 TikTok videos. She had already amassed a following on the platform with makeup and fashion clips, and said the song addressed an unnamed multimillion-dollar beauty brand that photographed her for a global campaign, didn’t pay her, and still used her image after she demanded they pull it.
Nemahsis began playing with the producers and multi-instrumentalists Danny Casio and Pablo Bowman, who flowed with her unconventional artistic process in a fashion she hadn’t experienced before. After achieving some success with Eleven Achers—including a moment in which Stevie Wonder attended a show and expressed his desire to collaborate—Nemahsis had found herself in the studio with various successful pop songwriters, but discovered their approach to music-making just didn’t jibe with her own. “Not because I’m so anti-industry—I’d love to write a hit and give them what they want, and I know that I probably could if I wasn’t the way that I was,” she says. “I like a full day on one song: Let’s take it apart—where can we fix things? And people didn’t like that. They would always go onto the next song after two hours. I usually left really anxious or crying, or I would get so worked up that I would start losing my voice from acid reflux, and people thought I was really weird.”
Hasan and I stroll over to the Brooklyn Heights Promenade, where the East River and the sky form an unreal frame for the horizon of Lower Manhattan. “This is like the movies,” she effuses, and we sit on a bench to take it in, pondering whether the helicopters overhead are patrolling an incident or simply ferrying a Kardashian to the Hamptons. We stare leisurely at the East River and into the sky, chatting about our tax brackets (we can’t afford helicopters), our mothers’ cooking, and being outside in nature—the way she loved exploring those 11 acres at home with her siblings.
In every one of her songs, Nemahsis extends towards dignity. In “Chemical Mark,” a lithe ballad produced by Michael Uzowuru, she sings about the phenomenon of generational trauma being passed down through DNA. “All we know is the pain,” she sings. “Have you heard?/Leaves a strain, DNA, like a curse.” When I ask her about the theme of self-esteem in much of her music, she says something that stays with me long after we part: “I can’t be upset with myself or not love myself, because the world already doesn’t love me. I love myself in spite of the world not loving me.”
But she refuses to sublimate herself, and while the music industry may have abandoned her, her voice is clarion; “Stick of Gum” has more than 2.8 million streams on Spotify, and the video’s scenes of Palestinian joy have been viewed over 175,000 times. After she posted her story of being dropped, artists reached out; it’s why Verbathim features production by Noah “40” Shebib, the Grammy winner best known for being Drake’s go-to guy—and why he did the work for free. Hasan compares 40’s generosity to a time in ninth grade when a popular girl was bullying her, and a popular boy intervened: “It was like a cool guy standing up for the weirdo.”
Still, Hasan is acutely aware of what people think about her, and about her place in the culture, too. The situation with her former label, she says, is part of a continuum. “It will continue to happen, because it’s happened in my life many times. It’s my reality,” she says, pointing to the unfavorable odds of a Brown, Muslim, Palestinian hijabi becoming a pop star in the West in 2024. “I’m just thankful I’m still making music. But I don’t want to be treated like an exception. I don’t want people to be like, ‘Oh, she’s so good for a Muslim girl. She’s so pretty for a hijabi.’ I don’t want to be the first. I want to be one of the best.”
