The Tunisian protest musician, who came to fame during the Arab Spring, is reclaiming her identity by pairing traditional beats with modern electronica

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“Screw ‘political’! I hate that word,” is not the sort of proclamation you’d expect from the so-called “voice of the Tunisian Revolution”, Emel Mathlouthi. A relative newcomer to the world pop stage, in Tunisia, she is rather like their Charlotte Church by way of MIA, a national treasure singing songs for the oppressed. Yet in a time of “alternative facts”, dog whistles and gas-lighting, her new record, Ensen (Human), makes a profound case for connection without rhetoric. Her pan-global riot of polyrhythmic percussion and tribal-trance breakdowns protests and clamours even before you add in her Arabic vocals. As she says herself: “Music is so immediate, it shouldn’t need translation.”

Now an NYC resident, Mathlouthi grew up under Ben Ali’s dictatorship in the 1990s as it stifled the arts, kneecapped the media and normalised censorship. So she did what she could to do rebel and formed a goth-metal band. But it was on discovering Arabic protest musicians Sheikh Imam and Marcel Khalife, as well as 60s American folk singer Joan Baez, that Mathlouthi realised she could approach political music in a more subversive way. “I had found something stronger: music that sounded soft but wasn’t,” she says. “Usually in protest music it’s the words that are important, but I was interested in being a composer and arranger [as well].”

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Armed with her new style, Mathlouthi played shows in Tunis where her raw approach contrasted with the poetic nature of most classical Arabic songs. Her fanbase blew up, but she also got barred from the airwaves. She decamped to Paris in 2008 and continued to release music online. Fatefully, she was in Tunis as the Arab spring unfurled in 2010, and was filmed singing her song Kelmti Horra (My Word Is Free) during a street protest. The video’s success turned it into an anthem for the uprising and, in 2015, she performed it at the Nobel peace prize ceremony. “There isn’t a more rewarding and exciting thing than being on a huge stage in front of thousands of people,” she says of the event.

By the time it came to a second album, however, the activist label had become limiting and it was time to reclaim her own sound. Building on the trip-hop and rock of her debut, she cites producers such as James Blake and Fuck Buttons as inspirations, and paired similarly expansive electronica with traditional Tunisian instruments. “I wanted my beats to be born where I was, and then encounter the modern world,” she says. Today, it’s a loaded move for an artist such as herself to find mainstream exposure, especially in the Trump era. “I have the opportunity to carry many struggles,” she says. “It’s important [for me] to be out there as a creative, Tunisian, Arab woman from a Muslim culture, but completely free.”

Ensen is out now on Partisan