From the moment Palestinian-Canadian singer-songwriter Nemahsis stepped on stage at Chicago’s Ramova Theater last fall, she had the crowd locked in. Her movements were understated and free, her presence magnetic — graceful twirls one moment, piercing eye contact the next. Performing as part of a benefit concert for Gaza, she kept it simple, just her in a signature hoodie and hat, a microphone, and the stage.
Before diving into “Chemical Mark,” the final track from her 2024 debut album, Nemahsis told the audience about a study she’d seen on intergenerational trauma in mice — how it took seven generations to erase the impact of what their ancestors endured. “Seven generations,” she repeated, letting it sink in. It felt like a thread tying her music to something bigger, a reflection of pain passed down, resilience carried forward.
A few months later, I’m on a Zoom call with the singer, a.k.a. 31-year-old Nemah Hasan, the Canadian daughter of Palestinian immigrants. She’s sitting in her family’s home in Toronto, the faint sounds of cats meowing in the background as she greets me from the other side of the screen. Dressed in a grey hoodie and green sweatpants, she exudes an authenticity that mirrors the rawness of her music.
Nemahsis hopes her music won’t resonate in quite the same way in the future. “I hope that when people hear about me, they’re like, ‘There’s nothing controversial about that,’” she tells me. “It means that we’ve normalized and humanized Palestinians. Then I’ve done my job.” Her music isn’t just about telling a story — it’s about rewriting history, breaking cycles, and ending the need for these stories to be told over and over again.
Her latest single, “Stick of Gum,” was recently listed as one of the top songs of 2024 by Spotify editors, garnering more than 4 million streams. Nemahsis sees this song as a “protest”: “We use pretty delivery, pretty people, pretty sounds, pretty songs to deliver educational material.” The song itself is deeply personal, emerging after, Nemahsis says, she was dropped by her former label for refusing to “cool down” her activism for Palestine.
“Stick of Gum” combines moody alt-pop production with Nemahsis’ anthemic yet haunting vocals, culminating in a chanted section that speaks unflinching devotion, where love and sacrifice collide — transforming something as fragile as a stick of gum into the explosive force of unyielding commitment. “Are you capable to reciprocate?/No matter how high or heavy the take/A stick of gum, or dynamite/You could plead guilty and I will do the time.”
The accompanying music video, directed by Aram Sabbah, was filmed in Jericho — her ancestral home — and features her entire family. As she wrote on Instagram, “‘Stick of Gum’ is a love song. So rightfully, what more can I care for than where I come from and who I come from?”
Nemahsis self-released her debut album, Verbathim, in September 2024. The album has received widespread acclaim from critics and artists including Lorde (who shared Nemahsis’ cover of her track “Team”) and Stevie Wonder (who once called a venue, not long before she was due onstage, to ask them to stall because he was still en route).
Nemahsis’ approach to visual storytelling is just as striking as her music. The cover of Verbathim features her wearing a white headband beneath a black hijab, similar to a nun, while someone holds her tongue. This powerful imagery, she has explained, is meant as a commentary on censorship. “Verbathim is just the word ‘verbatim’ except someone is grabbing my tongue,” she wrote on social media. “The holding of my tongue symbolizes the censorship I’ve faced trying to speak my truth. I’m dressed like a nun to show that the world doesn’t have a problem with modesty, but rather a problem with hijab.”
For Nemahsis, music and visuals are inseparable. “I don’t get inspired by reading words. I like to look at pictures and videos because I don’t see images in my mind — I only hear monologues and scripts,” she explains. “So, I look at things and feed off the audio in my head.”
When asked what she wants people to know about her, Nemahsis doesn’t hesitate: “I know what I want to say.” Despite all the success, Nemahsis remains grounded in the realities of her independent journey. “I don’t go into a lot of sessions. I don’t have a studio at home, I don’t play an instrument, I don’t have a mic, a laptop, or anything,” she says. “I just have my phone, my voice memos, my notes app, and my notebook. As an independent artist, I don’t have the opportunity to go to studios often because it costs a lot of money. So, I created an album with just 20 actual sessions and 12 songs. Imagine what I could do if I had the resources and studio time of a label.”
The songwriting process for Nemahsis is just as deliberate. “I won’t write for months or even a year,” she says. “But when I do, I write a lot — 10 days, two weeks. It’s not that I can’t write all year, it’s that I can’t afford to.” The struggle is real, but so is the passion behind her work. “I bottle everything up until I can afford to record,” she confides. “Lyrics come first, then melody. I believe the melody is within the lyrics.”
With each note she writes, each word she sings, Nemahsis is crafting a narrative that calls for change, not just in the world of music, but in the world at large. And with each song, each performance, she’s pushing further, further away from the cycles of trauma she hopes will one day be nothing but history.
