Somaya releases her debut album LAYALI on Friday, August 28. The Montreal singer has been working since 2024 across alternative R&B, neo-soul and Middle Eastern music, and first drew attention with the singles Rhinestones and Mary and a collaboration with Childhood Friend on SOIE.
Somaya describes LAYALI as a personal record, written to put heartbreak, loneliness and a longer process of self-discovery into words. She has said much of it is about femininity, and about making room for women to trust their own voices in an industry still mostly run by men.
The album arrives ahead of a release show on September 16 at La Sala Rossa, the Saint-Laurent room where a lot of Montreal acts have played their first real headline show. A live session filmed before release shows how the songs work in a room: the R&B production and the Middle Eastern instrumentation share the same space, and neither is just there to dress up the other.
Somaya has said she set no genre rules and followed the emotion instead. On the live session at least, that shows: alternative R&B and neo-soul move through Arabic textures without locking into one style.
The album comes out through Indie Montreal, the local promoter and label-services outfit a lot of unsigned artists here go through to get a record out. So it is a debut released independently, with Montreal behind it and no major label in the picture.
LAYALI translates roughly as “nights,” and Somaya, the daughter of an Egyptian mother, uses the album to reconnect with her North African roots. She does not speak Arabic, and has said she treats music as a way to express what language cannot. That heritage surfaces in the arrangements more than the lyrics, through oud, percussion and string parts she ties to the Egyptian singer Umm Kulthum. Several tracks also carry the voices of her family members, which she describes as a tribute to the women who shaped her.
LAYALI is out August 28.
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