Norhan

English pop with an Arabic heart — heartbreak songs that make you dance first and cry later.

Norhan is an Egyptian-American singer-songwriter who writes the pop she grew up wanting to hear and couldn't quite find. She started young — writing little songs with her siblings in kindergarten and performing them in the living room as if the world was watching. In fourth grade she joined the school band on clarinet and stuck with it for eight years before stepping up to the mic in choir. Music, in her own words, had been calling her "from the very start of her childhood."

Her sound fuses English pop and R&B with Arabic vocals and the drum languages she pulls into almost every track — reggaeton, afrobeat, the kind of grooves that make a room move before anyone hears the lyric. "I'd Rather Love" became her breakout — a song about the lingering ache of a relationship that's already ended — and she followed it with "Yakasara" alongside Egyptian-Canadian artist Malayka, the title a colloquial Arabic sigh meaning what a shame, what a loss.

She has performed to crowds up to 15,000 at the State Farm Center in Illinois, been featured by CBS News for her music and her activism, and spotlighted on Daytime Chicago for a voice that doesn't neatly belong to one genre or one language. For the Egyptian-American diaspora, and for every second-generation kid who grew up code-switching between two soundtracks, Norhan is building the pop catalog that finally sits in both homes at once. Her Sunday set closes out the weekend on the Festival Stage.