Haya Zaatry’s musical origins stem from wistful acoustic folk, blending seamlessly with Arabic musical inflections, imbibed in the cities that nurtured her: Nazareth and Haifa. Her characteristic smooth vocals are a flicker between Souad Massi and Joni Mitchell’s ingenuity, skillfully combining 1990s indie rock influences and modal variations.

A self-taught musician and practicing architect, Zaatry began her musical career with the much lauded “Manakir” (nail varnish) on the seminal Ghanni 3an Ta3rif album of a group of influential Palestinian artists in 2013. The song was featured in 2021 on the Netflix series “Al Rawabi School For Girls”.

Haya quickly embedded herself within the local grassroots  community through co-founding “Eljam”, a non profit community project empowering the Palestinian underground music scene from 2020-2016. Her melodies and lyrics take listeners on deep emotional voyages, inviting them to the most intimate corners of her colourful  Levantine soul, while thoughtfully challenging the boundaries of social, political and gender matters within her local environment.

Besides numerous local performances and collaborations Haya was the recipient of the XABACA art residency in Barcelona in 2017, empowering and connecting female  artists of the Arabic-speaking world.During the project, she starred alongside Lebanese and Tunisian artists in the documentary “Borders and Promises”, named after one of her songs.

Her debut album “Rahawan” which addresses intimacies of memory, space, gender and time, was  released on the 22nd of April 2022. bringing with it new acoustic sensibilities reflecting the coming of age of Haya’s compositions. Musically, the album shrewdly brings together North African influences of electric guitars and groovy flows, while reverberating the warmth of the indigenous sounds of Haya’s surroundings through percussions, modal inflections and original field recordings turning spaces of memory into musical markers.

As Songlines Magazine wrote:

“The music itself has a brooding ambience, dressed in Middle Eastern colours, but it is driven by indie rock-style drums and guitar. With the music, as with everything on this album, the dialect is local, but the language is universal.”