Yemen, grime and the search for home: Yemeni-British artist Intibint on finding her voice

For years, Yemeni-British singer, producer, and visual artist Intibint (the stage moniker of Noha Al Maghafi), who is also the sister of well-known BBC journalist Nawal Al-Maghafi, has always known she wanted to make music.

As a child in Yemen, she looked forward to traditional weddings and parties for the music, watching small bands perform as people socialised around her, more interested in listening than joining in.

But even as she enjoyed those moments, growing up in a conservative culture meant she never saw making music herself as something she was allowed to pursue, until completing her master’s at SOAS prompted her to stop ignoring that part of her life.

She began by messaging friends and looking for instrumentalists to work with before deciding to learn how to produce music herself. From there, she taught herself how to make and mix tracks, develop live sets and eventually perform them.

Learning those skills was important because she did not want to depend on others to turn her ideas into music, particularly after realising that, as a female vocalist, she was sometimes expected to wait for a producer or instrumentalist to shape the track.

"I always knew I wanted to pursue music. I always knew I loved music, and I was always very sensitive to it. It's something that's always been super important in my life," Intibint tells The New Arab.

That decision to learn the process herself has shaped Half Moon Eyes, her debut album, but the music on it comes from a much wider range of influences. Her earliest memories are tied to Yemeni folk music and musicians including Fuad al-Kibsi, Hamoud Al-Sama and Abu Bakr Salem, whose music she heard at weddings and family gatherings.

Growing up in London later introduced her to a completely different range of sounds, and she describes herself as someone who never really restricted what she listened to. Iron Maiden, Destiny's Child and grime are among the influences she names, with grime becoming particularly important during her teenage and university years. Its heavy bass and beats appealed to her, and that influence appears directly on the album.

Elsewhere, she takes a melody from a well-known Yemeni song and reworks it within a track that also draws on rock, metal and electronic music.

"I really am the definition of 'I listen to everything'," she says, laughing.

Those influences reflect the different places she has lived, but they also help explain why Yemeni music remains such an important part of the record.

Intibint has moved between Yemen, Egypt, Scotland, Slovakia and London, and says her experiences of growing up between Yemen and the UK have given her a particular perspective as a Yemeni woman and member of the diaspora.

Rather than treating that background as separate from her music, she has used it as part of how she writes, produces, and thinks about her work.

"My Yemeni heritage is a huge part of who I am as a person and a creative," she says, adding that her experiences as a woman growing up in Yemen and the UK have influenced both the sound of the album and the stories behind its songs.

That connection to her heritage is not limited to the musical references. Intibint also uses field recordings, conversations and other sounds taken from her own life throughout Half Moon Eyes.

She records things regularly on her phone and laptop, sometimes capturing a conversation, a voice or an interesting sound that she later finds a place for in a track. Even something as ordinary as a door closing can become part of the production.

For her, these recordings allow her to include personal experiences without having to explain them directly in the lyrics. They also reflect the freedom she has found in producing her own work, where she can experiment with sounds simply because she is interested in what they might become.

"I think it [the recordings] kind of makes it more personal, and it allows me to tell certain stories without having to be so literal or write exactly what happened in the lyrics," she explains.

Looking through the qamariya window

The idea of turning everyday experiences into part of the music also connects to the title Half Moon Eyes.

Intibint says she has always been interested in the moon and particularly likes the thought that people in different places can look up at it at the same time, sharing a moment without knowing anything about each other's lives.

She then connected that idea to the qamariya, a colourful stained-glass feature found in many Yemeni homes.

That being said, the qamariya is usually positioned above a window and takes a half-moon shape, with its name coming from 'qamar', meaning 'moon'.

Intibint was also drawn to the way the shape resembles an eye, which led her to the idea of eyes as windows into a person's feelings and inner life. The title therefore brings together the moon, Yemeni architecture and the album's wider interest in emotions that can be difficult to put into words.

"Qamariyas are always a half circle. They’re never a full circle, which I think is really beautiful," she says. "They kind of look like eyes."

While the title brings together ideas that were important to the finished record, the album itself was not planned from the beginning. Intibint started making the music in 2022 with a much simpler aim: she wanted to learn how to produce music in the way she wanted to hear it.

At the time, she was still working, mainly with refugees and asylum seekers, and was travelling whenever she had the opportunity. She spent time in Morocco and Slovakia, moved to East London and also lived in Glasgow, where some of the album's most personal songs began to take shape.

For much of that period, she was simply making music without thinking about whether it would eventually become a full project.

It was only in the last year, when she went back through the material she had accumulated, that she realised she could select the songs that meant the most to her and build an album from them. Some tracks changed considerably during that process, while others remained almost as they were when she first made them.

"I didn't know what I was doing," she says of the early stages of the project. "My main goal was to learn how to make music in the way that I wanted to make it."

Writing through anger, freedom and change

Looking back through four years of music also meant seeing how closely some of the songs were connected to particular periods of her life.

Hayati, for example, was written in 2022 after she arrived in Glasgow and found herself largely alone in a new city. She was working freelance from home and knew very few people, which gave her an unusual amount of space to think about what she wanted her life to look like.

That situation led her to think about the freedom that can come from being somewhere where nobody knows you or has expectations about who you should be. She connects that feeling to the guilt and shame she had experienced as a woman trying to live for herself, and Hayati became an expression of taking control over those decisions.

"I was kind of like, wait, I can literally do anything I want, like be whoever I want," she says of that period in Glasgow.

She hopes that feeling reaches other women who listen to the song, particularly Arab women and women in the diaspora.

That intention is part of a wider thread across the album, where personal experiences become starting points for songs about self-possession, protest and identity rather than being treated as isolated events.

That becomes more direct on Disrespectful, which Intibint says grew out of a frustrating encounter in which she was called 'disrespectful' after confronting someone over racist behaviour.

"I started making Disrespectful because I thought the beat was so sick. Then I had an interaction with someone who was being racist. I called them out on it, and they turned around and said I was being disrespectful. I remember thinking how funny it was that when people of colour, or Arabs, defend themselves, the blame can so quickly be turned back on them.

"I went home feeling annoyed, opened up my file and finished the whole song in about an hour. Then I thought, I'm going to call it Disrespectful too, because if you're going to call me disrespectful for calling out racism, then maybe we should just be even more disrespectful," she explains.

In sharing this, Intibint notes that the track also opens with a recording from a protest in Glasgow, where she later spoke to her mother about what had happened.

"It starts with a recording from when I was at a protest in Glasgow, and I was just telling my mum about it. I was like, 'Oh, the police showed up and stuff,' and she was like, 'You know, just be careful, look after yourself, don't get arrested again.' Because I got arrested in France once when I was working with refugees there. I think all of these kinds of situations have influenced how I see things and the world, and maybe they've influenced the direction of the sounds as well," Intibint notes. 

Finding home, finding her voice

Alongside Disrespectful, other songs on the album address protest, migration, chosen family, unfinished conversations, and private grief, bringing different parts of her life into the same record.

These experiences also inform the album's recurring focus on home, although Intibint says her understanding of what home means has changed in recent years.

For a long time, she associated home with Yemen and with the loss of access to ordinary family experiences because of the war.

She describes hearing people talk about going home for Christmas, finding old childhood photographs or visiting their grandparents and thinking about how those experiences were no longer available to her in the same way.

Living in different places has gradually made that idea less fixed. Over the past year, she says she has started to realise that home does not necessarily have to mean one particular country or city, while still recognising how important Yemen is to her identity and how much it has shaped her.

"I think releasing this album is also part of me letting go of the old idea that home can only be in one place," she shares. "Regardless of where I am, it doesn't change who I am or where I came from."

With the album slated for release on 18 September, there is plenty for Intibint to look forward to as she moves into the next stage of her career.

For now, however, she is less focused on deciding exactly what her next project will sound like and more interested in performing.

She says she used to be extremely shy about playing gigs and had reached a point where she did not want to perform at all, but that changed over the past two years, particularly during the last year.

“I think now I’m at a point where I really want to perform and I really want to connect with people through the music,” she concludes. 

Zainab Mehdi is a British Iraqi journalist and the Associate Features Editor at The New Arab. She holds a BSc in Modern History and International Relations from the University of Essex and an MA in Near and Middle Eastern Studies from SOAS

Follow her on Instagram: @zaiamehdi_/@zainabmehdiwrites_