Once described as a “musical supernova” by Scene Noise, Maryam Saleh is a singer, composer, actor and poet. As the teenage frontwoman of the band Gawaz Safar in the early 2000s, she revived the decades-old protest songs of folk legend Sheikh Imam for a younger audience. She broke new creative ground with the dizzying electro beats and sarcastic poetry of 2015’s Halawella, a critically acclaimed album she recorded with Soap Kills’ Zeid Hamdan. In 2017, she released Lekhfa, an opus of haunting lyricism and transcendent psychedelia made in collaboration with musicians Tamer Abu Ghazaleh and Maurice Louca and poet Mido Zoheir.