HANNET LEKLOUB

HANNET LEKLOUB

“This is our third album, and it includes songs that vary in terms of the time of composing. For example, the oldest one we composed is ‘Ya Ghrib’ in 2017 and the newest is ‘Denia Dour’ in 2020.” Tunisian musicians Sabrine Jenhani and Rami Zoghlami, who make up the duo Ÿuma, could never have foreseen the tumult of the COVID-19 pandemic and its related lockdowns when they started work on the songs that comprise HANNET LEKLOUB. And naturally it had an impact on the making of the record, as they tell Apple Music: “It was a strange time in which we were able to travel with difficulty to the Netherlands, where we recorded the album in just 10 days. We were lucky to work with the same sound engineer as the Belgian/Egyptian musician Tamino, who has been our music inspiration lately, by chance.”   The songs revolve around many aspects of the human condition, but alienation is the boldest theme of the album. “It is about alienation [in that] we live in Tunisia, but still we feel strangers because we don’t feel appreciated here,” they say. “It is also about the estrangement that we felt during the pandemic, in addition to the estrangement that we feel while touring away from our families, where we meet an estranged audience as well.” Read on for Ÿuma’s track-by-track guide to HANNET LEKLOUB.   ”Sucre” “‘Sucre’ (‘Sugar’) is about loving your country and self and the other. It is a romantic ballad about flirting—‘When I see you, I forget time and feeling tired’—but it is also about the alienation and the fear of losing the other. Maybe this is what love [is] about.”   “Wahna Kbar” “This song talks about the promises we made for our young selves. It is about childhood dreams of eternal friendship: ‘When we were little the world seemed big from behind the window.’ How are we able to protect this child who lives inside of us? Because growing up is a trick and we have to cling to that child within us and maintain true friendship.”   “Denia Dour” “This is the latest song we composed, and the most mature in terms of music. We were fortunate to work with an orchestra that played with us on the songs of the album. Our dream was to play with an orchestra one day and it came true.”   “Chloun El Kâa” “The song has a lot of rock influence from the rock stars we used to listen to when we were teenagers: Pearl Jam, Nirvana, Led Zeppelin and others. But we didn’t realise that at the time, only after completing it. We clearly had this influence in our subconscious and it came out spontaneously; one part reflects anger and the other one reflects nostalgia, like rock music.”   “Ya Ghrib” “Here we are talking about another kind of love—the love that you feel toward a stranger, as Leo Ferre says: ‘What I love about you is what I imagine.’ It is a mysterious and deep love, and yet superficial at the same time.”   “Lohkrin” (“The Others”) “This song was written during the pandemic shutdowns. That is when we discovered that we miss people we didn’t really used to miss before. We were under the impression that all seven billion of us will learn many useful lessons from this pandemic. The song talks about the best scenario that could have happened for each of us.”   “Rit Khyelek” “In 2018, we were sitting in a coffee shop in Paris. It was raining and we were watching the drops of rain coming down on the windows. We imagined a scene in a movie where a child sits on a train and looks at the world from behind the windows and imagines the ones she loves. Imagination sometimes controls us instead of reality.”   “Elli Fet” “This song talks about the loss of a person who was part of our lives, but still we reproach them: ‘This is not my own darkness, this is your light that died out.’ It is about the need of saying goodbye knowing that you will miss them.”   “Nokta” “‘Nokta’ is Rami’s favourite song, which we arranged in a way that gives us the freedom to jam when playing it live. The song deviates from the nostalgic feel in the rest of the album and gives you the room to cut loose and move on its groovy rhythm.”   “Fartatou” “Here we tried to start from when the song ‘Liya Snpn’ [from 2016’s Chura], which was loved by our audience and sparked our fame, ended. That is why we tried to understand its energy in a more mature way. ‘Fartatou’ means butterfly in the Tunisian dialect, and it talks about the image of the butterflies approaching the lamps in front of the ancient Bab Mnara in Tunisia and burning with fire.”   “Hmema” “This song has a magical energy inspired by Japanese anime. The music is loud but the lyrics are very fragile, talking about the message that you want to convey but you can’t, then you try to deliver it by a dove. Just like the mysterious love that feels like unexplainable magic.”

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