Introducing: Thoom with the announcement of new project ‘Everyday, Everything Is At Stake’

Thoom could have made two records: one rooted in American pop and another in experimental, punk-influenced Arabic music. Instead, she made Everyday, Everything Is At Stake, because separating those sides of her music would have meant separating parts of herself.

“I would be lying to my listeners if I tried to separate what seems the most natural to me,” she says. “The contradiction is the point.”  You can hear that decision across the nine-song project with ‘December Forever’ embracing the English pop songwriting she had long wanted to master, while ‘Janani’, a fully Arabic track, moves into more experimental territory. Executive-produced by Dylan Brady of 100 gecs and created between Los Angeles and Lebanon, the project takes its title from what she describes as “the immigrant mentality”: the reality of building a life in America while carrying family, history, and another part of herself in Lebanon, never fully integrating into either.

Inspired by her travels, the project is “part diary, part mythology,” with each song written as its own intense, self-contained story. Less a confession than a record of survival, the result is, in Thoom’s words, “messy, pop, Arabic, experimental, and unapologetic.” That same instinct shapes how she writes: “Melody always comes before the lyrics for me. The emotion always comes before you have the words to express it.”

On ‘I’m Going Back to Lebanon’ the project’s focus track and the song Thoom feels best captures the record, the possibility of returning home is inseparable from the instability that has followed her throughout her life. “Did the summer end? / Is it war again? / Am I going back to Lebanon?” she asks in the hook. The song moves through the complexities of a relationship alongside Thoom’s own experience of feeling torn between two places. With family members living through war in Lebanon, Thoom has grown up knowing that returning home can never be taken for granted, turning “I’m going back to Lebanon” from a simple statement of return into something more complicated: a hope, a question, and a return shadowed by uncertainty.

Accompanied by a music video directed by Neve Abcari, “I’m Going Back to Lebanon” features production from Dylan Brady, Frost Children, Spencer Light, and Count Baldor. It follows “December Forever” (500K+ streams), which appeared in an Instagram Story of Arca singing along last October, and final single ‘Towards the Sky’.

The project arrives ahead of Thoom’s upcoming North American White Flag tour with Bassvictim, amid growing international momentum for her. Alongside recent shows in Cairo and Los Angeles, including a show with Cece Natalie, she has performed across the US and Europe with Yves Tumor, underscores, The Dare, Frost Children, Bassvictim, Dorian Electra, and Jockstrap. Everyday, Everything Is At Stake, Thoom’s first project since her 2023 debut EP Fantasy for Danger, is the fullest realisation yet of a sound she has spent years developing. A separate album will follow later this year.

1. Janani

Producer: Dylan Brady

2. Towards the Sky

Producers: Dylan Brady and Liam Hall

3. December Forever

Producer: Dylan Brady

4. Bulldozer

Producer: Dylan Brady

5. Morocco

Producers: Dylan Brady and Ike Clateman

6. On the Floor

Producer: Jack Laboz

7. All My Friends Are Complete Strangers

Producer: Ike Clateman

8. Advil

Producer: Dylan Brady

9. I’m Going Back to Lebanon

Producers: Dylan Brady, Frost Children, Spencer Light, Count Baldor

Thoom is the project of Beirut-born, Los Angeles-based artist and producer Zeynab Marwan. She comes from a revolutionary Lebanese lineage and moved to Iowa at 10, continuing to return to Lebanon while never fully assimilating into the United States. A scholarship to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago led her into music production and the city’s DIY underground, where the freedom she found in Elysia Crampton, Total Freedom, and Arca expanded on an early love of mainstream pop and encouraged her to begin DJing and making music of her own. Shaped by years between Beirut, Berlin, Chicago, and Los Angeles, her work blends industrial electronics, alternative rock, experimental pop, and Arabic songwriting, balancing distorted production with vulnerable, tightly controlled writing. Contradiction and survival recur throughout her music. She cites M.I.A., Björk, FKA twigs, Kurt Cobain, SALEM, Lana Del Rey, and Rosalía among her influences. Her collaborators include Frost Children, Safety Trance, Evanora Unlimited, and Yves Tumor, whose ‘God Is a Circle’ features her background vocals. Her work has appeared in outlets including Dazed, Interview Magazine, NYLON, Office Magazine, PAPER, and Pitchfork.

‘Everyday, Everything Is At Stake’ Cover Art