Youssra El Hawary has been part of Cairo’s independent music scene for more than a decade, but her career has never followed a steady rhythm. She grew up between different musical worlds, studied classical music, worked in theatre, released her debut album No’oum Nasyeen in 2017, gained wide recognition.

Then, something shifted. For almost eight years, there was no new music. In July last year, she announced — much to the joy of her fans — that she was returning with new material, created during a period of big change. She had changed, the way she writes had changed, and the world around her had changed, too.

In this interview, Youssra talks about that long pause, about letting go of expectations, and about the slow process of learning to trust her own decisions. It’s a conversation about music, change, and what it means to keep going. And, of course, about the accordion, she plays beautifully!

— Youssra, as I remember, you were always into music — from a very young age. Even your teachers at school told your parents to pay attention to it. So if we go back to that time, what kind of music were you surrounded by?

— When I was very little, I mostly listened to whatever was on TV. We were living in Kuwait at the time, so I grew up hearing a lot of Kuwaiti music, which has a strong Indian influence, especially in its rhythms. Back then, we only had Kuwaiti TV, so that music was always present.

At home, though, my parents listened to Egyptian music, especially older classics: Abdel Halim Hafez, Umm Kulthum, Laila Mourad — that kind of music was always playing on the radio or on cassette tapes. Later, when satellite TV arrived, we started watching Egyptian channels, and that is when I was exposed to the pop music of my generation.

I also have two older sisters. When they became teenagers, they started listening to Western music, especially ’80s pop. I wanted to be like them, so I naturally followed what they were listening to and tried to imitate them.

Then, when I started piano lessons, I was properly introduced to classical music.

Over time, my tastes kept changing. Around the age of 13, I became a huge Michael Jackson fan. I knew all the songs by heart and copied the dances. After that, I moved into classic rock and spent a while listening to bands like Queen and The Doors. During that period, I actually drifted away from Arabic music for a bit.

Then jazz became a big part of my life. From there, music turned into a form of exploration for me. I would discover something that caught my attention and want to dive deeper into it — like Brazilian music, for example. I spent about a year really focusing on bossa nova. After that, I felt drawn back to Arabic music, especially microtonal music.

So it was always moving through different phases, each one leading naturally into the next.

— And you play the accordion. Do you think it is still perceived as a masculine instrument?

— When I started, it definitely was. There really weren’t any women playing the accordion in Egypt — at least not that I knew of. That absence was part of what drew me to the instrument. It felt challenging. The accordion is heavy, it is large, and it wasn’t something women were expected to play.

The accordion has existed in Arabic music and has appeared in large ensembles, but it was never a leading instrument in traditional projects. It has also been closely associated with belly dance music and cabarets, which may be one reason why there have historically been few women accordion players.

— And what do you love the most about this instrument?

— Its strong character. You can’t really ignore it — you hear it immediately, you see it immediately. Once it is there, it brings a very clear identity to the music, no matter the genre.

What is also fascinating is how differently it is played from one place to another. The accordion in France sounds nothing like the accordion in Brazil, for example. Sometimes it feels like a completely different instrument, just because of the way it is approached. What I knew from Egypt, and what I later learned in France, felt like two separate languages.

The instrument carries many personalities. And what is great is how complete it is on its own. You have bass, rhythm, and melody all in one instrument. It is loud enough that you don’t even need a microphone. That is why it is so closely tied to movement — to travelling musicians, to gypsy music, to storytelling. You can carry it, sing with it, walk with it, move from place to place.

— I am also curious, what was the hardest thing for you when you first started learning it?

— At first, I thought the hardest part would be coordinating the left and right hands. With the accordion, you can see your right hand if you look down, but you never see the left one. You have to memorise the space between the buttons and trust your body.

But it turned out that the most difficult part is actually controlling the air. It is a bit like holding a balloon — you don’t want to let all the air out, just enough. Some air goes one way, some goes another, and you have to manage that balance without ever fully seeing it happen.

It is all about how you move your body and how you move the instrument. And that is where the magic is. You start to feel like you are part of the accordion itself, controlling it with your whole body. It becomes almost like an extension of you.

— Let’s talk about your music. I would like to go back to your song, On the Street, one of your earliest works, which I am in love with. What is it about, and how did it come together?

— At that time, I was just starting out as a singer-songwriter. Before that, I had been working mainly in theatre. I sang and played there with my troupe as well, but songwriting was still very new to me. This song came from that very early stage.

The lyrics themselves were written much earlier, long before I started working on the music. They were written by Amina Jahin, a poet and the daughter of the poet Salah Jahin. She originally wrote the text as the introduction to the movie El Hareef (The Street Player (1983)) by Mohamed Khan, which I love deeply. I knew the words by heart and had always admired them.

So when I started thinking seriously about writing songs and developing my own material, this text came back to me. Even though it was written in the 1970s, it still felt incredibly relevant to the time we are living in now. It talks about something very simple: the idea of being able to kiss in the street.

Cairo is a city full of contradictions. In some places, certain things are acceptable; in others, they are not. There is almost an unspoken rulebook about what you can do and where. The text plays with that idea — how something as ordinary as a couple kissing in public can suddenly become controversial, invite judgment, or even provoke outrage.

I started working with the text, and the rest happened quite naturally. I wrote the melody, my friends played with me, and then someone suggested we make a video. That was how things worked back then — everything came together very intuitively, driven by the moment.

— So that was about 13 years ago. Then, in 2017, you released your debut album, No’oum Nasyeen. After that, there was a long silence until 2025. In a post, you wrote that life changed, you changed, and the music industry changed. So my first question is: what changed for you during those eight years?

— After the debut album was released, I spent about a year ot two performing and touring with it. I was playing a lot of festivals, concerts, travelling with my band. It was a really good time.

But toward the end of 2019, I remember having a very specific conversation with my band. We were looking back at those two years and talking about what we wanted next. I realised there was something missing for me on stage. I didn’t feel fully free. I felt like we were always focused on following song structures, playing everything “right,” sticking to what we had rehearsed. And I wanted something else.

Most of us in the band played more than one instrument, so I suggested we try switching instruments onstage, leaving more room for improvisation and opening things up a bit. I wanted the performances to feel more alive.

We had plans, but then COVID happened. Everything stopped. All the plans were cancelled — festivals, touring, rehearsals, everything. And that was probably the biggest shift for me. Suddenly, I wasn’t performing at all. That pause forced me to really think about my music: what I wanted to write about, how I wanted to perform, and how I saw myself as an artist.

In many ways, it mirrored my journey as a woman. That shift from doubt, from doing what you think is expected of you, toward trusting your own voice and instincts. COVID gave me the time to rethink my debut album, my place in the industry, and what kind of artist I wanted to be.

At the same time, everything around us was changing. People were relying more and more on social media, on fast-paced music consumption, on constant visibility. I had to ask myself where I wanted to be within that system — or whether I wanted to step outside it.

Slowly, something else began to happen. I started spending time with neighbours, friends, and musicians, just playing for the sake of playing. Long jam sessions, improvising, sometimes painting, sometimes just making music with no goal attached. That became our way of coping. I really valued that time. I learned new kinds of music, different approaches, and it reminded me why I loved making music in the first place.

It was a strange period. On one hand, my career felt completely frozen. On the other, I was discovering a new kind of freedom — enjoying music outside of schedules, expectations, and constant performance pressure.

That was also when I started exploring sound design and digital production. Before COVID, I barely used digital tools. I never really created music digitally. I began experimenting with computers, recording, building sounds. That was another big shift.

And then, of course, the whole world kept changing. Every time it felt like things might start again, something else happened — wars, political crises, collective grief. It felt like waves of change, one after another, never just a single moment.

During that time, most of the musicians in my band also moved on. Some left Egypt, some changed careers, some simply stepped away. Suddenly, I found myself alone. Before, we arranged songs together, built live shows together. I was always the main songwriter, but it was still very much a collective process. Now I had to do things on my own.

That pushed me to believe in myself differently. To learn new skills, to trust my decisions, to take responsibility for every part of the work. And that changed my relationship to songwriting, too. Before, many of my songs were sarcastic, playful, almost hid behind humour. I never really thought of myself as a poet.

After this shift, I felt ready to give my words more space. To let things be transparent and direct. To get closer to what is inside, to be honest with myself in the music. That, too, was a change. And that is what I tried to do with Taraddud.

— In Taraddud, we can hear sounds from the streets of Cairo. Why did you decide to bring them into the music?

— It is something I never expected I would do. If you had asked me six years ago, I wouldn’t have imagined it at all. But it really started during COVID.

I live in downtown Cairo, one of the busiest and noisiest parts of the city. When COVID hit and everything shut down, the area became completely silent. Downtown is already a place where not many people actually live — many apartments are empty, geared more toward tourists and short stays — so suddenly, there were only a few lights on in a few windows. And the sound just… disappeared.

That silence shocked me. It felt like a completely different place. Sometimes I wasn’t even sure I was on the right street, because the sound was gone. What surprised me most was that I remembered the sounds of the streets. I had them just stored in my head. That is when I realised how much the identity of a place is built through sound.

As life slowly came back, I began noticing how the sounds returned, little by little. That is when my interest in sound really started. I began thinking about what it means to live in such a noisy city, how that noise affects me, my relationships, and even communication. Do we really hear each other when we talk in the street? Or do we lose part of the emotion because of all that noise?

Around that time, my partner was working on a film and asked me to handle the sound design. I ended up working on this project, involving sounds from Cairo.

At first, I was very doubtful. But something about the process felt natural. I was surprised by how much I enjoyed it and how things began to come together. It felt very different from writing songs with chords and structures. There was less control — almost as if something else was working with you. When people ask me how I did it, I don’t always have an answer. I was just experimenting and listening.

Originally, I didn’t plan to mix sound work with my music. But once I started writing songs again, I felt like something was missing — or rather, that I had learned something I couldn’t ignore anymore. The lyrics I was writing were closely tied to my daily life in Cairo, and sound is such a big part of that life. Bringing it into the music felt natural.

For me, it wasn’t about simply recording sounds and looping them. That has been done for decades. What interested me was the emotional weight of sound — how it carries memory, how it holds atmosphere, and how it can support the lyrics. In that way, sound became another way of imagining Cairo, and of bringing the place itself into the record.

— Which sounds exactly can we hear?

— What you actually hear is layers and layers of sound. There is the general ambience — people walking, talking, shouting, the sound of slippers hitting the street.

Then there are the more recognisable signals: police sirens, alarms, church bells, the call to prayer from mosques. Street vendors add another layer entirely. Some use very specific sounds to announce themselves — like the metal knock used by people selling gas cylinders, so you know they are passing by. It is loud, and you hear it throughout the day.

In the summer, drink vendors have their own sound cues, while others use metal rattles or tools — much larger than simple shakers — that cut through the street as they move. All of it overlaps and blends together.

Add the constant presence of people talking and shouting, and it becomes a dense, living soundscape. Chaotic and overwhelming at times — but also, somehow, beautiful.

— When are you planning to release the next part of the EP?

— I am expecting the release sometime in spring 2027.

Originally, Taraddud was meant to be an eight-song EP. But as I started working on it, it became clear very early on that the project was growing into something much bigger than I had planned. The tracks became longer, there was more space for field recordings and sound design, and the whole process took far more time than I expected.

At some point, I realised this couldn’t stay a small project. That is why I decided to split it. I released the first three tracks as an EP, and now there are five songs left. Those will come out as a full album, Tawazon.

They all come from the same place and the same intention as Taraddud, since they were written during the same period. But musically, the album allows me to explore different directions and push things further.

— It seems like this period of self-exploration — both musically and personally — really began during COVID and is still ongoing. Exploration feels like a big part of what you are doing now. So I am curious — what is new you hope to explore next?

— I am always trying to understand what I want to express, and then to find the right tools to do that.

That is why, for example, I didn’t use the accordion at all on Taraddud. I didn’t want to be boxed into anything. For a long time, I felt that people were trying to define me in a very specific way — as this “little, cute accordion girl,” playing joyful songs. So first of all, I am not little, haha. And even back then, I didn’t see my lyrics as joyful in the way people described them.

One of my most listened-to songs is Babtesem (I Smile). People hear the smile in it, but if you listen to the lyrics, it says: I smile because I love the world. I smile because I have been scared since I was born. That is not exactly joyful. Still, the image stuck: accordion, French melodies, cheerful girl. I don’t regret that phase at all — it is part of my journey — but I felt I had the right to step away from it if it no longer resonated with who I was.

Maybe it would have been smarter, from the outside, to keep leaning into that image. But I don’t feel like doing that anymore. During that time, so much was happening in my life — touring, playing with different musicians, watching other concerts, building relationships, breaking up, leaving, arriving. You can’t go through all of that and stay the same person. Change becomes inevitable.

At the same time, I was learning to work very differently on the music itself. I was involved in arrangement, production, and decisions I hadn’t made before. Working alone for long stretches forces you to think about every single detail of the music. It is difficult, and sometimes you feel completely stuck. You question yourself: Why am I doing this? Who said I could do this? You go through phases of doubt, of not trusting yourself.

But that process also makes you realise how much you were influenced earlier — especially when you are young in the industry. People tell you, “This is how things are done,” and you believe them, because you think they know better. Learning to trust yourself isn’t only about lyrics. It is also about how you make your music — the choices you make in production, arrangement, even in the smallest details of a mix.

When people ask me about my early songs and my connection to the revolution, I always say the same thing: for me, revolution isn’t about writing explicitly political lyrics or singing protest songs. The real revolution is trying to make music on your own terms within the industry. That is much harder. Rebelling in attitude is easy. But insisting on doing things your way, step by step, decision by decision — that is where the real work is.

And that, for me, is what my journey is about.