All Palestinian art from the last 75 years, whether Sliman Mansour’s paintings or Ghassan Kanafani’s poetry, always begins before the artist and always at the same point in time: the Nakba of 1948.

Since then, the journey of catastrophe, displacement and exile is one every Palestinian continues to take, constantly dreaming of return and using whatever means of resistance along the way until rooted once more on their land.

All of Saint Levant’s music flows from this journey as it’s source. From his first single to his last EP, From Gaza with Love, music is the art of resistance that chose him – whether sung in Arabic, French or English, it’s the universal language he uses to speak his dreams of return into existence. In his newest project, Deira, that’s exactly what he’s doing.

Deira embodies multiple journeys for Saint Levant. Named after the hotel where Saint Levant spent his childhood in Gaza, it is deeply personal. Exploring his own growth from then to now, from being forced to leave Palestine to loving and losing, confronting trauma and loneliness, as well as his rise to international Acclaim, it brings forth a Saint Levant that has naturally evolved in both sound and image.

While he’ll always be a lover boy, in Deira, he has also grown into something more. Here, he is unapologetically Cheb Levant, channelling his Algerian blood and the legacy of the raï to chabbi icons whose sounds played from his father’s radio during his time at Deira. Born out of opposition to colonialism, these diverse soundscapes are more than just genres or styles, they’ve long been vehicles of rebelling and vocalising revolutionary and political thought throughout the region, pointing to the centrality of music as a conduit to anti-colonial resistance.

In Deira, Saint Levant reintroduces these sounds into the present, bending its sounds with his distinct borderless cadence while also exploring Palestine. Written over the course of two years, Deira brings some of SL’s closest collaborators, and some he would once dream about working with just a few years ago, into a passion project that is collaborative, complex musically and also rich in social commentary and political thought. After all, those are unavoidable principles of Palestinian and Algerian Saint Levant as he continues on his path towards 2048, with Hotel Deira in Gaza as its endpoint.

Visually, the project was lead by the creative direction of Pedro Damasceno (SL’s creative direction), with research done by Sarra Alayyan, design and typography led by Nada Sultan, design and creative contributions by Michael Lewis