Lolo Zouaï Won't Sing Any Love Songs

Growing up in San Francisco, the Paris-born, French-Algerian singer-songwriter Lolo Zouaï didn't plan on becoming a musician. She had strong talent, artistry, and dreams of stardom, but it just wasn't something that ever seemed real—there weren't many musicians in her immediate surroundings.

It was when Zouaï moved to New York with her mother after dropping out of college in Nashville that a sense of urgency and possibility hit. "I was nineteen and I was working at a burger restaurant down the block from our house, living with my mom, and I was just like, 'Okay, I don't want to be doing this burger-making shit forever,'" she says, open and unfiltered over Zoom from Los Angeles, her current home base. The rest is a classic New York hustling story.

Zouaï saved up and bought a mic and a MacBook, taught herself Logic Pro, and started producing in her tiny bedroom, flipping her mattress up to make enough room for her gear. She started reaching out to producers she admired via DM. She posted covers on Instagram. She eventually began connecting with some other creators, first a writer in the classic R&B tradition and later Stelios Phili, the experimental R&B producer who has worked with everyone from Young Thug to SZA and Big Sean. "I was really grinding," Zouaï says. "I knew that I had the voice and the drive and the talent for it, but I just didn't have any connections whatsoever, so I just kind of made them."

Now twenty-six years old, Zouaï—born Laureen Rebeha Zouaï—is on the verge of a major breakthrough. She released her debut album High Highs to Low Lows in April 2019, attracting fans including Billie Eilish, Dev Hynes, and Grimes. She performed at Ralph Lauren's Paris Fashion Week show and sang for Dior in New York last year. She signed to The Lions, modeling for Coach and Tommy Hilfiger. And she's currently on tour with none other than Dua Lipa and Caroline Polachek. On top of all that, she is mastering a new album for 2022. This—a time when the world is slowly opening up, with global touring coming back and tepid, cautious hopes of Covid-19 becoming endemic—is her moment.

There's something resolutely empowering about Zouaï's self-made ascent, equal parts modern social media savvy, DIY in the vein of Lil Nas X, and old-school hustle. Her story harkens back to the days before manufactured pop stars, when all you needed was talent, ambition, and some combination of nerve, hard work, and luck to make it. Of course, a breakthrough means nothing without substance underneath.

The depth within Zouaï's sound came with time and experimentation. "I was making really traditional R&B," she says of her early output. "I wrote so many songs, but it wasn't unique to me. It wasn't enough to stand out."

A trip to France to see her mother's family shifted the artist's perspective. "Coming from such a culturally mixed family, why am I not putting that into my music?" Zouaï recalls asking herself. "I can put in the Arabic melodies that I have in my mind and I can put in the French words. That is what's going to make me stand out and that is who I am in my music."

She met Phili, the Cypriot producer who collaborated with her on High Highs to Low Lows. "Cypriot music is kind of similar to Arabic music," explains Zouaï. "We connected on wanting to make something more interesting."

The result pulls together the diverse linguistic and cultural influences that make Zouaï who she is: Arabic melodies; French and English lyrics sung in Zouaï's hazy honey voice; West Coast rap; the slow-burning, stripped-down production of darker experimental R&B weaving into boppy pop highs, dripping with swagger and optimism. Stories of family and identity are mixed in with tongue-in-cheek moments. Clever wordplay is a constant. Her songs are pop-R&B in the mode of Ariana Grande's thank u, next. They're also very real, with a depth and sense of intimacy rarely found in mainstream pop songs. In contrast to so many other artists, romance is not the theme. Zouaï's music quietly and directly subverts expectations and assumptions, with preconceptions about audiences’ ability to connect to bilingual music only the most obvious.

Take "Desert Rose," an instantly seductive, transfixing track that could easily be read as a goodbye to a lover but instead works through the vulnerability of being turned away by her family in Algeria, who disinvited her from a wedding after seeing her flip off the camera in an Instagram post. "Every song has a specific story to it," says Zouaï. "'Caffeine,' even though it's just a fun, sexy song, is about somebody that I worked with at a restaurant and how they would always chug energy drinks before their shift because they had to stay up. Then my song 'Summers in Vegas' is about going to visit my dad in Vegas because my parents are split. Everything in my music is true."

Zouaï thinks we have enough love songs. Instead, she explores cultural identity, family relationships, and the ups and downs of living life on your own terms. "I think that my music is for independent people who go through the emotions," says Zouaï. "I haven't really written about falling in love because I don't feel that that is a huge part of who I am. And I know that a lot of music is about that. I feel like people who relate to my music are tired of music always being about romance and want it to be about something else. It's about being free in that way. I talk about my family and my experiences with growing up Algerian but not feeling accepted. Every song is different, but the reason I am connecting to a lot of different people is because they can find their one song and that hooks them for life."

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