For more than a decade, Wafia has built a reputation as one of Australia’s most exciting young singers. Born Wafia Al-Rikabi, she had her first taste of global attention with a fuzzy bedroom pop cover of Mario’s Let Me Love You in 2014, amassing more than 5m streams on SoundCloud. Then came a slew of EPs, tours and admirers including Pharrell Williams, Kylie Jenner and Jaden Smith.
It had all been leading to her long-awaited debut album, which was set for release this January. But then the artist’s adopted home town, Los Angeles, caught fire.
“I just didn’t think it was a thing I could celebrate or be present for in that time,” Al-Rikabi says via Zoom. “The thing that got me out of bed in the mornings … was volunteering. I spent a lot of time in the community, picking up and dropping off donations, just trying to do what I can.”
That empathy and community spirit drives Al-Rikabi’s work: announcing the album’s delay on Instagram, she wrote: “I also can’t help but see the scenes across LA and think of Gaza, think of Syria and Lebanon, think of my family who have grown so accustomed to this smell, the sight of such rubble.”
She has now released the album, Promised Land, a month after its scheduled date. It’s a collection of alt-pop gems canvassing romantic, platonic and familial relationships, and the complexities of migration. With influences ranging from bossa nova and R&B to psychedelia and indie rock, the album is buoyed up by two moods, “whimsy and feminine … in order to have a sense, ultimately, of optimism”.
The migrant experience is one Al-Rikabi knows intimately. Born in the Netherlands to an Iraqi father and Syrian mother, she moved frequently with her family during a nomadic childhood. When she was 11, they relocated to Brisbane – but there was no real sense of home. Now 31, Al-Rikabi has a new perspective: “I feel like I understood my parents’ choices a lot more once I made the leap myself in moving to another place.”
In adulthood, Australia has become a kind of anchor: “Having the Australian accent has been an answer a lot of people will accept here in America that I find really relieving … Sometimes I don’t want to tell people that I’m Iraqi-Syrian, because it’s really loaded and you don’t really know how other people respond to that.”
The ties of family wind their way through this record, including spoken-word passages in Arabic. But like many family relationships, it’s knotty.
After leaving high school, Al-Rikabi went to university to study medicine but her father encouraged her to leave in pursuit of her musical dreams. These days they are estranged. The song House Down unpacks those tricky feelings: “You have so much anger and my heart hurts when I try to understand you,” she sings.
“He was my biggest champion ever, and also the source of so much anguish in my life,” Al-Rikabi says. “It’s particularly hard because I’m Arab and growing up, you’re really taught to take care of your elders, and there was this expectation that as my parents aged, I would look after them … That’s been one of the biggest griefs of my life.”
On the other hand, moving away strengthened Al-Rikabi’s relationship with her mother, to whom she dedicates the tender track Vision of Love. “For a long time, I didn’t really understand her,” she says. It wasn’t until the pandemic, when she began living alone for the first time, that she had an epiphany. “I remember coming home and realising that fruit in the bowl gets mouldy if my mother doesn’t get to it for us … I’d never seen a peach get furry,” she says. “That was her way of telling us every day she loved us.”
Al-Rikabi’s music has been overtly political in the past, such as the 2017 single Bodies, written about the Syrian refugee crisis. The songs on Promised Land are more about personal relationships, from new romance (Big Thoughts, Crystal Ball) and a defiant kiss-off to an ex (Sad Shit) to the migration journey (Dragonfly) and a sweet sisterly ode (Say It to the Moon). But it’s all connected.
“Being queer, growing up Muslim, all those things inherently make me political – so even when I am writing a love song, it is also inherently political,” she says. “I get to colour my canvas with whatever colours I want, because I’m an artist and no one’s putting words into my mouth.”
Promised Land by Wafia is out now through Heartburn Records
Wafia’s songs to live by
Each month we ask our headline act to share the songs that have accompanied them through love, life, lust and death.
What was the best year for music, and what five songs prove it?
2009: I Gotta Feeling – Black Eyed Peas; The Climb – Miley Cyrus; Down – Jay Sean; Fireflies – Owl City; Jai Ho! – the Pussycat Dolls.
What’s the song you wish you wrote, and why?
Kids by MGMT, because I wish I could be that carefree in my songwriting.
What is the song you have listened to the most times this year?
NUEVAYoL – Bad Bunny.
What is your go-to karaoke song, and why?
Life Is a Highway – Rascal Flatts, because I’m a big fan of Cars the movie.
What is a song you loved as a teenager?
Re: Stacks – Bon Iver. It transported me when I needed to not be where I was.
What song do you want played at your funeral, and why?
Ahwak – Abdel Halim Hafez. It’s a song that my parents would always play in the mornings and I think it would be a nice thing to go out to.
What is the best song to have sex to, and why?
Burning – Tems. Just try it.
