Nxdia: “My community is the whole point”
The alt-pop singer-songwriter talks embracing their cultural background, building community through their music, and touring.
Photo: Ryan Jafarzadeh
Between playing shows on their first festival circuit, rising alt-pop star Nxdia released their debut mixtape, I Promise No One’s Watching. Needless to say, it was a whirlwind of a summer for the Cairo-born, Manchester-based artist who is soon to set off on their first headline tour across the UK and Europe. We had the pleasure of chatting to them about embracing their cultural background, building community through their music and touring ahead of this exciting new chapter.
From a young age, Nxdia leveraged writing not only as a creative outlet but also as a means of processing emotions. This affinity all started with a small Strawberry Shortcake notebook that their Mum had gotten them. “I started journaling in there, but it was really silly stuff at first,” they explained. “It was stuff like talking about poetry, music, or who I liked at school. I think I always found it easier to write on paper than say out loud how I was feeling”.
They also picked up their love of music early on, explaining that they would always be humming and singing under their breath. “I was like a weird ghoul,” they quipped. This early interest transformed into something bigger when Nxdia began exploring slam poetry and started making their own songs.
They touched on how music felt like an escape from some of the trickier aspects of growing up. “I was really badly teased for a lot of things. I think I was just not very aware,” they muse, further explaining that they struggled with not always knowing the “correct” way to act in a given situation. As such, music became a lifeline of sorts. “I just needed an outlet. I think I had a lot of feelings that I didn’t know how to communicate,” they said. “I was kind of trialling being a human being and music weirdly was the soundtrack to that. Whatever I would write at the time felt important to me, not because it was permanent but because it was true to what I was experiencing at the time. And I went through a lot growing up, it was kind of crazy”.
Nxdia attributes some of these difficulties to their experience as a third culture kid. While they were born in Cairo, they moved to Manchester when they were eight years old. When asked how that experience factored into this struggle with social rules and norms, they remarked, “I did grow up in Cairo, where social behaviours are not like a million miles away at all, but like maybe people are more open and more likely to talk to you or interact with you. Community is kind of more of a thing”. When reflecting on how these cultural differences manifest in terms of communication, they noted that in the UK, “People are less direct in certain ways. I was always told exactly what people were thinking around me in Cairo. But like here, I feel as though I was kind of like ‘Well, you didn’t tell me that’ ‘cause I’d been operating under the guise that people communicated everything they were feeling”. They described the experience as “feeling so at home in kind of both arenas but also feeling very outside of them”.
While Nxdia has often felt like an outsider, as an adult, they are now striving to carve out their own community and sense of belonging: “I am fighting for it now in a way that I never did when I was, like, thirteen,” they said, explaining that they once used to feel ashamed of being from a different background. “So, I’m protesting that in a lot of ways over the past few years, where I’m just like, ‘I really love my background. I really love my culture. I love the food. I love everything’. I’m trying to integrate it so much more. I think music is a very beautiful way of doing that,” they cited Arabic and Egyptian music as a large source of inspiration. They also spoke of their love of Arabic films, specifically comedy caper No Retreat, No Surrender (2010) starring Ahmed Mekky, which is one of their all-time favourite films. “Egyptian comedy films, there’s nothing like it, I swear,” they said.
As for how they integrate their background into their music, Nxdia writes bilingually, incorporating both Arabic and English in their music. That choice came quite naturally to them and was something they experimented with when they were first making music in their teens. However, the people they were working with at the time didn’t quite seem to get it, leading Nxdia to shelve the idea. They then spent the next two years writing exclusively in English, but this caused them to feel disconnected from the music they were making. After speaking to a friend and fellow musician who wrote in both English and Spanish, Nxdia was inspired to give bilingual writing another shot.
When speaking of the first writing session they had after deciding to write bilingually again, they told us, “I just felt as if I had four crayons and suddenly I had like thirty-six. I was like ‘this is amazing’. I get all these colours now and I get to mix them and I get to integrate so much more. And there’s certain things that don’t translate from Arabic”. Ultimately, embracing that choice helped them feel more connected to what they were making.
Since then, Nxdia has written a plethora of fantastic songs, which culminated in a mixtape dubbed I Promise No One’s Watching. The year they worked on the project was very intense due to a lot of what was going on in their personal life, such as undergoing top surgery or coping with a car accident their parents were in. Similarly to how they’d coped with feeling isolated at school, throughout the year they turned to music and writing as a form of escape.
“I didn’t realise it was the making of the mixtape at the time. I was just trying to get through the year alive,” they explained. “I was trying to understand what was going on around me”. Their writing was their way of doing so, which resulted in deeply vulnerable lyricism. The mixtape’s title itself was almost an affirmation, allowing them to be the most truthful version of themselves. While putting all those feelings out in the world may be daunting for some, for Nxdia it was simply a relief not to have to deal with them anymore.
That level of authenticity has also enabled them to cultivate a real sense of community with their fans: “My community, it’s like the whole point”, they remarked.
Beyond the mixtape, Nxdia will also be connecting with fans on their first headline tour set to kick off in the fall: “I feel like I’m gonna explode… in a wonderful way”.
They toured earlier this year with Sofia Isella across several cities in Europe and described the experience as “the best time”. They found themselves taken aback by the fan support: “When I was in Germany and Amsterdam, I couldn’t believe how loudly everyone was singing. I couldn’t believe how wonderful the reception was and how much warmth there was”, they noted. This enthusiasm from their fanbase has further fuelled their excitement for their own headline tour. “I just feel very grateful, and I can’t believe that I’m doing it and there’s gonna be people there”, they said.
In addition to the Sofia Isella Tour, Nxdia also played their first festival season this summer with appearances at The Great Escape, Bludfest and Reading and Leeds. “I didn’t realise how easy it was to meet other artists in that kind of environment,” they said.
They cited Bludfest, which is organised by Yungblud, as one of their favourite festivals of the year. “Everyone backstage was incredible. Getting to hang with Chase Atlantic and Denzel Curry and people that I just really respect, I was like ‘Who let me in?’”, they joked. “I just thought it was so surreal”. They said that part of them almost felt like a teenager again, and a desire to have a gossip session about it with their past self.
“I thought festival season was amazing in terms of like seeing the power of being in a space where the crowd just naturally grows as people walk by”, they noted. “It’s crazy ‘cause I was kind of watching these festivals fill out more and more and more”. As such, one of the highlights of the season for them was truly meeting new people and the natural growth of their fanbase. They also touched on how the experience was extremely validating to them as an artist. “I love making music, but I don’t have a huge opinion on how good I am or how well-received it is or anything like that”, they said, explaining that they at times would invalidate their own music. “I can’t invalidate the amazing people who showed up. Like my amazing community, who showed up with signs or gifts or anything like that intentionally. Or who came to the meetups that I held at the festivals”.
In that way, festival season wasn’t just fun, it was healing. In a full circle moment, Nxdia has managed to foster that community they so craved with their very own music.