On the Rise
Nabeel

“I really came late to feeling confident about creating anything,” he says early on in our conversation, almost laughing at himself. “I spent my twenties in such an absorbing period of music, just taking everything in.”

That decade, in his words, was about "being an observer, a critic, a lover of art", not yet someone brave enough to offer his own voice. Raised in Virginia after leaving Iraq as a young child, Razak’s world split itself between languages, landscapes, and inner worlds. He describes it now almost clinically: "I was always a consumer of those things. I never felt ready to make anything of my own until probably like 2018."

It’s not that Razak didn’t love music; he did, deeply, especially pop, melodies, catchy hooks. But the gap between loving art and making it yourself, especially as someone raised between cultures and identities, felt wide and treacherous. “Until that point, I had almost no belief in myself as a musician,” he says. It took starting "a really silly pop project" called TV Sunset with a friend and writing carefree songs on a cheap Casio keyboard to finally crack open something looser, something that didn't demand perfection. “It allowed me to let loose and just start making music in the first place.”

Before Nabeel was an idea – before there was even a real band – Razak had to give himself permission to create and to be seen. “Being in predominantly white indie spaces always kind of just made me feel like indie was this cool guy club that I wasn’t part of,” he admits. “For lack of a better word, it just felt like a grungy, dirty white dude thing going on.”

And yet, in 2018, something shifted. A growing dissatisfaction with being only an observer, a heavy loneliness that demanded to be translated into sound—these currents converged. “I think it feels apt,” Razak reflects. “It feels right somehow that this is happening now.”

At the core of everything Razak and his bandmates create together, the songs, the fragile melodies, the thick guitar textures—is feeling. From their 2023 EP shams - شمس to the follow up a year later, najoom - نجوم, what’s driving people to Nabeel is the wistful euphoria coursing through its DNA. In fact, if there’s no emotional current running through the work, Razak won’t pursue it. “That's kind of my litmus test, he says. “I don't really continue with a song unless I'm feeling an emotional pull during the writing process.”

His writing process sounds almost mystical when he describes it. He doesn’t try to shape songs with genre expectations—even though listeners might hear echoes of shoegaze, college rock, or post-punk. Instead, he focuses entirely inward, chasing a feeling until it imprints itself onto the track. “If I'm feeling like, almost like, teary-eyed because of a feeling I'm having while I'm writing a song,” he explains, “I'd like to think that that is gonna be cast into the DNA of whatever I'm writing.”

Rather than aiming to be a shoegaze artist – a label that’s often attached to Nabeel – Razak says he isn’t even that immersed in the genre. “People assume I'm like, really into shoegaze music, and I'm really not that into shoegaze, to be honest,” he shrugs. “There’s like a few bands, of course, but mostly when I write, I’m thinking in pop music terms.”

It’s an unexpected admission, but one that fits the deep emotional textures in his music. He’s chasing something older, deeper: a kind of longing, the feeling of being split between times, places, languages. “I think I'm just learning to lean more into the fact that if there's a feeling I'm having and I'm feeling it when I'm writing, then maybe other people can feel it too.”

Even when Razak writes in Arabic—a language in which he’s admitted he feels less fluent now—he leans into the vulnerability rather than away from it. "It's kind of a practice and acceptance of my own position," he says. "Writing simply, using the words that were used in my house growing up, that I used with my mom or with my dad. Words that are really colloquial and intimate. That’s part of me."

Nabeel (نبيل) is more than the name of this project. It’s a reclaiming, reaching both backward and inward at once. Razak chose to name the project after his father—a quiet tribute to his roots, to the unseen softness that shaped him. “There's so much that's been offered to me through my family,” he says. “Through my parents’ stories, through looking at old photographs, through this sort of imaginative looking back.”

This sense of looking back became part of the language of Nabeel. After spending much of 2022 traveling through the Middle East, including a visit back to Iraq for the first time as an adult, Razak returned to Virginia with a head and heart full of questions. "When I think of family, when I think of love and my deepest connections to Iraq..." he pauses, "family means so much to me and in ways that are so painful that I can't even talk about it sometimes."

At one of Nabeel’s early shows in New York, Razak caught sight of something he hadn’t expected: a few audience members, mouthing along to his lyrics. It’s one of the defining moments of his time creating music with Nabeel. "We played a show in New York and there were a couple random Arab people who were singing, like mouthing along. And I was like, ‘whoa, that's a different thing. I never expected to see or hear.’" For Razak, it wasn’t about the numbers in the crowd—it was about the recognition, the almost unbelievable feeling that somewhere, somehow, these songs were speaking to others who carried similar fractured histories.

That moment sharpened a mission he already felt burning inside: to lean into the discomfort of being "not Arab enough," to make music that didn't dilute itself for anyone, and to carve out space for diasporic Arab weirdness. "I think for me, part of the mission of Nabeel is to sort of be like, ‘okay, I am very insecure about this,’" he says. "I've always been, like all diaspora kids are in some way, insecure about my place in between cultures and feeling not Arab enough at all." Singing in Arabic, making noisy, emotional, rough-edged indie music, none of it was about fitting neatly into expectations. It was about showing up anyway.

The wish is clear: a world where Arab artists feel free to be strange, loud, soft, whatever they want to be. Much of his inspiration for Nabeel came from being part of online diaspora communities – spaces where young Arabs were sharing art that felt raw, alternative, exciting.

Razak searched for sounds that matched the complicated, yearning textures inside him, and sometimes he found them. He mentions discovering Kiss Facility, a project linked to Sega Bodega, and labels like Drowned By Locals in Jordan as rare beacons. "That's like a really cool alternative Arabic project," he says, almost with relief.

In many ways, Nabeel became a way to express what words couldn’t fully hold. Growing up, he always felt a "double generational gap" between himself and his parents. Not just the usual differences between child and parent, but layered with culture, war, immigration, and language. “It always felt like the generational space between me and my parents was bigger,” he says, admitting how long he feared showing them his music, unsure if they would understand it, or worse, reject it.

"I used to think my lyrics would sound stupid and childish and petty to them," he confesses. "But honestly, I learned a lot of that fear was just me creating judgment in my own head." Slowly, almost imperceptibly, that distance began to shrink. His mother, despite the language barrier and the sonic dissonance of shoegaze guitars, has shown real curiosity and quiet pride. His father? Filled with pride even though the sound may not be up his street. "I showed him the video for ‘Lazim Alshams’ a long time ago, and he basically asked me to turn the volume down so he could just watch the video," Razak laughs.

The project is bigger than just sharing songs with family, though. It’s about weaving together strands that have too long been held apart: Arabness and alternative music, Arabic and DIY culture, tenderness and masculinity. “I want people to feel more comfortable doing weird shit in Arabic music,” Razak says plainly. “I want to inspire more Arab artists to experiment. To unabashedly express themselves through whatever means they choose."

It’s a bold move in a music world that often demands a kind of polished bilingualism, a proof of fluency to be allowed to represent a culture. Razak rejects that quietly but completely. "With Nabeel, it’s kind of a practice in accepting my own position," he explains. "I know my Arabic isn’t strong compared to someone living in Iraq today. But this is my reality. And that's okay."

That decision also shapes the emotional transmission of the music. Many listeners, Arab and non-Arab alike, won’t understand the literal lyrics but they feel something anyway. “I write simply and lean into emotion," Razak tells me. "I think sometimes not having perfect fluency lets me say things more directly, more elementally."

He likens it to the music he loves most, songs that hinge not on complicated metaphors or grand concepts, but on a simple, gut-punch feeling. It’s what he admires in artists like Bladee from Drain Gang, who often sings in his second language, English, with rawness and emotional clarity. “There's a way simple language cuts to meaning differently,” Razak says. “Hold on to a shard of hope" is a Bladee lyric that resonates with him: “That line could sound so different if it wasn’t someone who spoke with their heart. I literally walked around the entire day recently thinking about that line.”

When he sings, even if a listener doesn’t understand a word, the music moves them. Razak sees this as the real magic of Nabeel, a kind of emotional telepathy. "I like to believe that the thumbprint of the emotion gets cast onto whatever you're writing," he says. "It feels like magic in some way."

The next Nabeel EP – titled ghayoom - غيوم, meaning "clouds" and released in July – isn't a concept album. It’s something looser, gentler: a kind of gathering of emotional fragments from a particular moment in Razak’s life.

Most of ghayoom - غيوم was written in a year of deep transition: after Razak returned from traveling in 2022, while he was living back at his parents’ house, trying to figure out what his life would look like next. "It was a super transitory sort of experience," he explains. "I was not really in the flow of normal life."

Without the structure of a day job or the distraction of routine, Razak found himself staring down the big questions: family, mortality, meaning. "I was on the outside looking in at life," he says. "Facing my family, facing the future, facing all this transience , but also wrestling with what the point of anything really is."

He describes it as "an existential, zoomed-out sort of time," and you can hear that sprawling, searching energy all over ghayoom - غيوم. The songs don’t follow straight lines. They float, they blur, they shimmer, like clouds themselves. "It feels like a constellation of different ideas that come together and present this bittersweetness," Razak says.

He’s not sure he even likes the word "bittersweet"—it sounds too tidy for something so raw. But it's close enough. ghayoom - غيوم is about the ache of fleeting moments, about the beauty that’s always already slipping away.

On "yalma", the next single, Razak captures one of those perfect instants when life feels briefly, astonishingly whole. “The last line that repeats says, ‘If it stays like this, what more could we ask for?’” he explains. It’s not about grand triumphs or dramatic stories. It’s about the tiny glimmers of peace we manage to catch and hold, even knowing they'll dissolve.

"My whole life is spent trying to find those moments," he admits. "I’m constantly obsessed with maximizing that feeling of when your brain is just receptive to beauty." ghayoom - غيوم is a record made out of those moments: transient, luminous, heartbreaking in their brevity—and absolutely real.

More than anything, Nabeel feels like a project built out of fragments: old family photos, childhood memories, scraps of music and feeling stitched together into something startlingly new. At the heart of the project is a yearning – not just for a place, but for a wholeness that may never fully exist. "There’s so much going on within us internally and we all want somebody to bear witness to it," Razak says. "It’s stunning that we have such capacity to feel so much. Yet so much of it just happens quietly inside."

There’s an almost desperate tenderness to the way Razak talks about these moments. “I'm so addicted to those feelings," he says. "Times when your brain is just receptive to beauty.”

There’s a temptation in Western music journalism to treat non-Western identity as an obstacle, something to be overcome. Razak rejects this framing outright. When I ask him to tell me more about the Iraqi-American experience, he doesn't hesitate: "It’s a superpower" he says.

It's not about escaping the difficult realities of diaspora life—the loss, the dislocation, the insecurity. It's about recognizing the richness that comes from carrying both grief and beauty at the same time. "Having this non-Western world to look back on feels like an alternative," Razak says. "Even if it’s imagined. Even if it’s idealized. It offers me a different kind of emotional palette."

For Razak, emotion is the most important language in his music – more important even than lyrical comprehension. "When I write a song, it’s driven by the emotion I’m feeling when I’m writing it," he says. "I don’t like to move forward unless I’m inside that feeling."

And in a world where art can so often feel over-intellectualized or detached, Nabeel’s music insists on the opposite: presence, vulnerability, and the simple yet radical act of feeling.