Thoom wants her music to be felt before it's understood

Her slogans aren’t just provocations but the foundations of an experimental universe in which sweetness coexists with brutality, and melody with distortion. Her debut album Everyday, Everything Is At Stake, doesn't concern itself with side taking: “WE DON’T APOLOGIZE FOR OUR INTENSITY.”

A radical vision for the future of pop, she’s been given the thumbs up from girl EDMers Ninajirachi and underscores, Kim Petras, Frost Children, The Dare, and Addison Rae. “My life right now is so busy, I’m loving it,” she tells me. “It’s one thing after the other, it’s like I can barely keep up, and that’s where I’m the happiest. I really removed every single distraction; I feel so inspired right now. I want to create so many things.” Traversing all kinds of North American territories, Marwan's velocity between nations saw her share a tour bus with Bassvictim on their White Flag tour, but she aspires to sell out stadiums, and she’s not settling for anything less.

The support slot has coincided with the release of a project that centres the Arabic new wave – a maximalist collision of art pop, punk and noise that places her in combustible company alongside the curiosity-inducing Kiss Facility, Dua Saleh, nabeel, and Mustafa. “I wanted something that encapsulated how intense making this felt,” Marwan explains of the title. Everyday, Everything Is At Stake’s origins lie with an unfinished film she was developing with her sister, Lebanese actress and director Yumna Marwan. Though it never materialised, the story would have chronicled the siblings’ real, shared experience following an immigrant who wakes up in Iowa, completely dissociated from her surroundings.

“WE SURVIVE IN ANY WAY WE KNOW HOW": Never quite feeling at home in either the United States and Lebanon, Marwan’s move to Iowa at the age of 10 planted the seed for a record that weaves displacement as the root of “messy, and unapologetic” commotion. Inspired by her travels, each song is its own intense, self-contained fight for existence from living two lives, essentially, never fully integrating into either. For a young Thoom, “the immigrant mentality” meant carrying another part of herself elsewhere, her own family history. To this day, it’s a condition with no tidy resolution, and one she avoids reducing to a single, easily digestible narrative. A single full play of the nine-track mixtape suggests there's romance in the fury.

Before approaching pop music, Marwan was working in visual art, searching for an adequate medium that could express what she wanted to communicate. Then came encounters with DJ Total Freedom, and with Chuquimamani-Condori, the Californian trans electro artist formerly known as Elysia Crampton, who finds ontological inspiration in her indigenous Aymaran heritage. “I’d never felt so understood and seen than when I heard them,” Marwan remembers. “I hope other people can feel this way.” The precise circumstances of that first encounter saw her sitting on a porch in Chicago, while a friend played a DJ set that mashed up a Beyoncé acapella with a Crampton beat. “Nothing’s spoken to me so much in my life," she tells me.

“I think pop is changing, isn’t it? Pop is not unattainable anymore.” Evidently, Thoom is embracing of an accessible form, though her own musical interpretation is anything but conventional – the bombastic “Bulldozer” is exactly as advertised. Executive produced by Dylan Brady, those tracks pledge a natural affinity with the unruliness of 100 gecs’ discography but Marwan's vision for Thoom reaches beyond any one scene or reference point – hyperpop or otherwise. She wants her music to transmit on the grandest possible scale, without sacrificing the sharp instincts that brought her to experimental electronic spaces in the first place. “I was imagining a stadium,” Marwan insists. “I was not imagining my bedroom, I was actually trying to surpass my bedroom, you know?”

When she first met Brady, the pair made four songs together. There was little need to explain herself to a “wizard” like him: “We inspire each other so much, it just feels like we’re in recess, in the playground, in elementary school. I don't even think we talked about what we were making. I just said, the first time I saw him, that I’m imagining flying in a stadium, or levitating. I wanted the drums to feel ancient and huge, and almost ancestral.”

Over the course of two years, Everyday, Everything Is At Stake was made partly in Amman, the capital of Jordan; in Lebanon; and in Los Angeles. An “alien world” to Marwan, she cherishes the process of every day waking up and going to the studio without a definite result in mind. “Having so many ideas that I want to burst out, even at some point feeling so exhausted by how much music is being made, leaning into that.” The end result is complementary, an immediate record where pop meets noise, extending Thoom’s sonic vocabulary past the Arabic indie music her father loved.

Equally central to her being is the multi-platinum superstar Nancy Ajram and Haifa Wehbe, widely celebrated for setting the standard of Arabic beauty. Growing up, Marwan absorbed the musical landscape of these wonder women. It’s something that continues to surface in her work, having made its way into her subconscious. “For me, it’s a very natural inspiration,” she notes. “I don’t force it into the music, but it’s there. I'm also very inspired by Abo Sahar, who's a producer in Egypt. I went to Cairo for the first time; it was just like an explosion. I was collaborating with so many people, and it was so fun to see everyone's instruments. I think there will be also a lot more inspirations coming too.”

Thoom's native tongue arrives without compromise on the album’s fully Arabic opener “Janani”. “Whenever I sing in Arabic, it brings out different emotions and feelings and ways of processing that English could never,” she tells me. While Arabic comes to her as intuitively as English, it admittedly feels “more guttural” tapping into the other side of her dual identity. Marwan doesn’t want to separate the two, but she is wary of the burden placed on Arab artists to represent an entire culture through their practice, as though every artistic decision must require an explanation. “It is what it is, I people need to get more used to complexity because everything’s been dumbed down.”

Directed by Neve Abcari, the video for “I’m Going Back to Lebanon” is a pointed gesture that captures this complexity with gunshot punctuation. Wild West aesthetics are for the taking; Thoom refashions familiar desert dunes, denim pants, and the wide-brimmed silhouette of a cowboy hat. “I wanted to use that and turn it on its head a little, this iconography of America which has been reproduced over and over again. I also see myself in it.” Still recuperating from the ripple effects of the 2020 Beirut explosion, and Israel’s destruction of Lebanon, one can imagine Thoom’s daydream Madonna-isms functioning as armour; a sense of escapism from the unease of homecoming realities that cannot insulate her. The song’s hook questions: “Did the summer end? / Is it war again? / Am I going back to Lebanon?”

Her declaration of independence is deliberately confrontational. “BEAUTY AND VIOLENCE ARE DIFFERENT SIDES OF THE SAME COIN.” Speaking on the language around girlhood, “My experience of it has been very savage, violent, like cathartic exorcism. That’s why I also say pop and noise are different sides of the same coin. To me, one can’t exist without the other. My idea of what girlhood is, to have spit and gravel next to the dolphins and the Hello Kitty, you know?” Instead of opposing impulses, the mixtape reveals two expressions of the same experience. The breadth of her beauty can be found over a trap beat in the dulcet “December Forever”, which caught the attention of Arca earlier this year.

Marwan's honeyed poptimism sees her put her sword up, a symbol of her high-crowned ambition, in the touchstone “Towards the Sky”. “A new age is coming”, she sings over synth stabs. Personal, political and pleasurable, its spirited video accompaniment honours the Moroccan Tecktonik underground electro dance movement. “When I was really young in Lebanon, all the older kids were dancing this Tecktonik dance. It had all different versions around the world, but it was always people in their tiny room or on the street or something just dancing to electro, like really intensely. When I was young, I was like, ‘Oh, these are the coolest people in the world.’”

After the release of her EP Fantasy For Danger, the significant expansion of Marwan's world ever since has given way to live gloving spectacles, tracing neon-green light patterns in the dark with her two backup dancers. Everyday, Everything Is At Stake proclaims an Arabic pop renaissance, and there is more to come soon, too. She teases a subsequent album, produced by Bassvictim’s Ike Clateman, to follow later this year.

A longtime friend, Marwan and Clateman first met in Chicago, and would later put on shows together before the Thoom project took off. “He went to the UK, I lived in Berlin for like a year,” she says. Then I lived in New York, and we kind of just hadn't been in touch. Then we got in touch again. We’re making music that I’ve been trying to make maybe my entire life, like, for a very long time. I know this sounds intense. It’s just very intuitive and free.”

Fame might be an extension, but pop, to Marwan, is fundamentally about telling stories and creating connections through sound before language even enters the equation. The stakes are everything, and with the right tools, anything is possible, she explains: “I think the world is ready for my type of Arabic pop. If you can make it this good, a lot of people will be happy to listen to Arabic. Even if they don't know what I mean.”