Since debuting last year, Egyptian-based anonymous artist ZAF hasn’t been short on releases, putting out two LPs, an EP, and at least 20 singles. He now returns with his third full-length album, ‘elza3albeymawet’, a lengthy, psychedelic moodboard into his world of glitchcore. The 24-track project is anchored in trap and melodic, experimental hip-hop, while pushing further into the internet-native textures of New Trap.
‘elza3albeymawet’ centers on unexpressed grief, unspoken resentment, and toxic interpersonal drama, pairing heavy emotional themes with punchy, erratic, and aggressive flows. Across the album, ZAF moves through paranoia, betrayal, scene politics, ego battles, toxic relationships, and emotional numbness, constantly circling the idea of holding onto bitterness will eventually eat you alive, so you might as well let it out, laugh at it, or rage through it.
Despite its lengthy tracklist, the album runs for less than an hour, with most tracks sitting under two minutes and none stretching beyond three. The songs hit quickly, dropping straight into their central idea without much introduction. The production follows suit, favouring a gritty, DIY, hyper-energetic texture shaped by ZAF and a wide range of collaborators, including Youssef, Hamdaboi, Hatem Bas, Mahib Sleat, Omar Taa’i, Barakkat.T, Jayrewind, Maximizacion, IFEEGANG, Harpoeth, Deno31K, Ultcore, Soxlss, Typhelicia, NXTCY, and TKD.
With more than 15 producers involved, the album could easily have felt scattered, yet the lack of a single production identity works in its favour. In a way each track feels like another room in ZAF’s head, built around the use of gritty industrial edges, distorted basslines, clipped 808s, unconventional percussion, pitch-shifted vocal chops, and dark synths, that give the album its constantly shifting surface.
ZAF’s vocal style sees influences from rage-trap, synth-punk, and hyperpop all bleeding into one another, keeping the project unpredictable without losing its sense of movement. Like on ‘Don’t Be a Weirdo’, he leans into a dry, conversational drawl, stretching syllables with a deliberately careless tone, while ‘Gamedfash5’ turns that restraint into a rapid-fire, high-energy bark. On ‘Babylon’, the delivery becomes more theatrical and self-mythologizing, matching the track’s god-tier confidence, before ‘3omry Ma A2zeek’ and ‘Remediieess’ strip things back into strained, heavily Auto-Tuned melodies that sound closer to an emotional breaking point. Across the album, internet culture and pop references sit alongside darker reflections on trust, mortality, fake friendships, and the politics of the local scene, with his exaggerated confidence often feeling less like pure bravado than another layer of armour.
ZAF searches for reasons to keep going while describing a broken sense of reward, isolation, reckless behaviour, betrayal, and friends getting locked up. Romance follows a similar pattern, moving between the desire for genuine love, obsession, ego, and emotional whiplash. By the time the album reaches its more vulnerable moments, the bravado starts to crack, leaving behind someone trying to make sense of what he has lost. One track can find ZAF claiming he is untouchable and operating above everyone around him, before the next drops into emotional paralysis or a desperate need to feel something again. The erratic sequencing becomes part of the storytelling: the album doesn’t simply describe this cycle, it moves like it.
On first listen, you can pick out some of the samples scattered across elza3albeymawet, pulling from cinema, Arabic pop, regional underground rap, internet culture, and familiar pieces of pop culture. But with each repeat listen, the sampling starts to reveal more of its character as ZAF chops, pitches, distorts, and reworks the source material to fit his own glitch-heavy production language. A familiar melody might initially register as part of the beat, only to reveal itself as a recognisable sample once you listen closer, while an old film score or rap vocal can be edited so heavily that its original context almost disappears. The samples here aren’t straightforward nostalgia so much as references that ZAF deliberately bends into his own fractured sonic world.
That approach is particularly effective on tracks like ‘Sinners’ and ‘Alqahera 30’, where older cinema soundtracks are pulled into distorted, bass-heavy arrangements, giving ZAF’s themes of paranoia, betrayal, and social tension a more cinematic weight. ‘Gamedfash5’ and ‘Coda’ draw from MC Amin, the aggressive textures of early Egyptian underground rap with the hyper-processed world ZAF is building now. Elsewhere, the sampling gets more ironic and playful with ‘2ool Tany’ flipping a familiar Nancy Ajram reference into something darker and more sarcastic, while ‘3ozt A5odha Fe El 7alal’ pulls from Death Note’s psychological world to underline the track’s themes of obsession and emotional manipulation.
