zeyne

A degree in Brighton, a microphone in Amman

Zein Izzat Sajdi was born in Amman on 15 December 1997, into a Palestinian-Jordanian family whose grandparents came from Nablus. The house ran on music rather than around it: her father collected records, her eldest sister Lina played piano, and her mother directed a dabke troupe for more than two decades. Zeyne joined a dabke group at five and started piano at six with a Russian teacher, later taking classical singing lessons from a Japanese one.

None of that was meant to become a career. She read media communications and sociology at the University of Sussex in Brighton, graduated in 2020 and had a public-relations job lined up in London. Covid travel restrictions stranded her in Amman instead, and she filled the gap by posting covers on Instagram. The clips travelled far enough to get her into the Jordanian Female Artist Collective, which in turn got her onto a stage at the Amman Jazz Festival.

In December 2020 she met the producer Nasir Al Bashir, who pushed her to try writing rather than interpreting. She had never written a song. A contract with Keife Records followed, and the decision to go at music full-time was made before she had any evidence it would work.

Five years of singles, and the months she stopped

"Minni Ana" arrived in March 2021, switching between Arabic and English, and "Nostalgia" followed. "Balak", released in July 2022 with the Palestinian-French artist Saint Levant, widened the audience considerably. In October 2023 she joined 24 other artists from across the region on "Rajieen", a charity single for Gaza relief. She has also written for other people's records, including songs for Elyanna, Massari and Issam Alnajjar.

The work stopped for a while. Zeyne has said she paused making music for six months after 7 October 2023. When she returned, the output was more direct: "Ma Bansak" in February 2024, which she also performed for COLORS, becoming the first woman from the Levant to appear on that platform; "Bali" in June 2024, written out of her state of mind during the humanitarian crisis in Gaza; and "7arrir 3aqlak / Asli Ana" in November 2024, an R&B track built over dabke rhythm that became the song most people know her by.

The same stretch brought her mother's serious health diagnosis in 2024 and, in July that year, a detention in the United States while travelling to a Seattle show. Both ended up inside the album she was already writing.

AWDA: thirteen tracks, built as a loop

AWDA — عودة, "return" — came out on 16 October 2025 after roughly eighteen months of work. It runs to thirteen tracks, produced mainly by Nasir Al Bashir, Khalil Cherradi, Ratchopper and Sofian Grillo, with Saint Levant playing a saxophone solo on "Arrib Minni" and the Egyptian R&B singer Bayou featuring on "6 il Sobh". Zeyne has described the sound as Arabic alt-pop and R&B, and names Fairouz, Frank Ocean and Rosalía as the three artists she measures herself against.

The lead single, "Hilwa", arrived in July 2025 and was written for her mother, her grandmother and Palestinian women generally; its artwork shows three generations joined by one continuous braid. Elsewhere the record moves between Levantine instrumentation and 2000s R&B: the spoken intro "7arrir 3aqlak" sets out the reclamation of Palestinian identity, "Jdeed" deals with autonomy, "Yamma" and "Yom Wara Yom" with maternal connection and obsessive-compulsive thought, and "Si3r Al 7ob", "Liya" and "Bali" with emotional exhaustion in transactional relationships. Zeyne sequenced it to be played in order, as a loop rather than a playlist.

Speaking to Dazed in November 2025, she put the album's argument plainly: "Occupation is not only by land, but also mentally, and in how you see yourself." She also describes herself as a micromanager over her own output, on the grounds that an audience can tell when an artist's heart is not in the work.

The reception, and the numbers

On 11 December 2025, NPR's Ann Powers included AWDA among her ten albums of the year, placing it alongside records by Wednesday, CMAT and William Tyler. YUNG Magazine named it its album of the year. The streaming count has climbed steadily rather than spiked: Zeyne had passed 51 million streams across platforms by July 2025, 58 million by the time the rescheduled tour was announced in August 2026, and 67.5 million according to venue listings for the September run.

Her live profile was built partly on other people's stages. In 2025 she played the OffLimits festival in Abu Dhabi and appeared as a special guest at two of Ed Sheeran's Mathematics Tour stadium shows, in Qatar and Bahrain, in front of a combined crowd reported at around 65,000. She is managed through U-Nation, a joint venture between Unsigned and Live Nation, which is how a nine-city European headline run became possible at all.

The tour that had to wait

The AWDA Tour was announced in January 2026 for March and April, taking in Amsterdam, Berlin, Paris, London, Brussels and Istanbul. It did not happen. The outbreak of war on Iran in 2026 made the run, in Zeyne's words, emotionally heavy and logistically difficult, and she pulled it rather than play it badly; the stated aim was a show people could step into "fully present, fully safe, and fully there".

Rescheduled dates were confirmed on 10 August 2026, expanded from six cities to nine, with several venues upgraded in capacity rather than simply rebooked. Existing ticket-holders were told to check their inboxes; remaining tickets went to general sale at 5pm Amman time. Before it started she took a short summer festival run: Jazzablanca in Casablanca on 7 July, Montreux Jazz on 15 July, the Gurtenfestival in Bern on 17 July, the Mahrajan festival in London on 1 August, and Lowlands at Biddinghuizen in the Netherlands on 21 August.

The headline run then went: London's KOKO on 1 September, Academy 2 in Dublin on the 3rd, Botanique in Brussels on the 5th, the Élysée Montmartre in Paris on the 7th, Amsterdam on the 9th, Säälchen in Berlin on the 11th, Santeria Toscana 31 in Milan on the 14th, La [2] de Apolo in Barcelona on the 16th, and Istanbul to close on the 18th. As of early October 2026 she is listed as off tour, with just under 8,000 fans tracking her for date alerts.

What comes next

The bridge between the album and whatever follows is already out. On 27 February 2026, via MDLBEAST Records, Zeyne released AWDA – عودة (Live Studio Sessions), a three-track set reworking "Bali", "Si3r Il Hob" and "Arrib Minni" with live instrumentation and the studio production stripped back. It was framed as a step towards new material rather than a souvenir of the old, and a longer EP of live studio recordings has been flagged for 2026.

The wider significance is not hard to read: an artist singing largely in Arabic, signed to labels in Amman and the Gulf rather than London or Los Angeles, selling out upgraded rooms in nine European cities and landing on an American critic's year-end list. On the use of dabke and other traditional elements in a record otherwise built on R&B, Zeyne has been unsentimental: when it shows up in the work, it is because it is part of her story.