Ziad Zaza returns with two new tracks, ‘Hayaty Hayaty’ and ‘Flirty’, leaning into a lighter, more romantic side of his sound while pushing his production somewhere a little less expected.
‘Hayaty Hayaty’ opens on a light Arabic pop guitar riff, glossy synths and a syrupy pop melody, punctuated by loose handclaps that give the track an unmistakable early-2000s Arabic R&B-pop feel. The arrangement stays deliberately simple before Zaza and Soulja start trading choruses, eventually dropping into a breakbeat passage that hints at a beat switch without fully committing to one, it’s almost exactly where you left it in a small fake-out that keeps the track playful rather than dramatically reshaping it before the beat returns under Soulja’s verse.
The track plays like a soundtrack to a post-summer flirtation, matching the tongue-in-cheek visuals directed by Khaled Mokhtar. Set on a deserted highway, the video follows Zaza and Soulja as they run into two girls dealing with car trouble, turning an otherwise stranded roadside moment into a series of sarcastic jokes, flirtatious back-and-forth and unserious romantic tension.
‘Flirty’, meanwhile, pushes Zaza further into electronic territory, built around hard-edged electronic percussion, acidic synth lines and a chorus that lands somewhere between catchy pop and left-field club music; the track feels noticeably more maximalist. Zaza leans heavily into Auto-Tune, switching up his delivery with a lower, more seductive vocal tone that sits against an increasingly overproduced beat.
It’s a sound Zaza had already tested out during his recent North Coast performances, where apparently his more electronic direction received a strong response. Over stacking warped synth textures, punchy drums and sudden shifts in the production around his vocals in an excessive take on electro-pop.
