The Friday Dispatch
Nabeel, Jeffrey Martin, SE SO NEON, Pip Blom and more
Nabeel is blending guitars and shaping worlds
Yasir Razak is ready to make it. Fronting Nabeel, a shoegaze project that channels diasporic memory and contrasts it with the world of indie grime, he’s building a group that feels fresh, important, and transcendent. Born in Iraq but raised in Virginia, Razak grew up a lover of music but never a creator. The gap between loving art and making it yourself, especially as someone raised between cultures and identities, felt wide and treacherous. “Until that point, I had almost no belief in myself as a musician,” he says. It took starting "a really silly pop project" called TV Sunset with a friend and writing carefree songs on a cheap Casio keyboard to finally crack open something looser, something that didn't demand perfection. “It allowed me to let loose and just start making music in the first place.”
In 2018, something shifted. A growing dissatisfaction with being only an observer, a heavy loneliness that demanded to be translated into sound—these currents converged. “I think it feels apt,” Razak reflects. “It feels right somehow that this is happening now.” In response, he created Nabeel, a group that blends thick guitar and languages — Razak writes mainly in Arabic — and became a way to express feelings and ideas that words couldn’t fully hold.
Nabeel (نبيل) is more than the name of this project. It’s a reclaiming, reaching both backward and inward at once. Razak chose to name the project after his father—a quiet tribute to his roots, to the unseen softness that shaped him. “There's so much that's been offered to me through my family,” he says. “Through my parents’ stories, through looking at old photographs, through this sort of imaginative looking back.”
This sense of looking back became part of the language of Nabeel. After spending much of 2022 traveling through the Middle East, including a visit back to Iraq for the first time as an adult, Razak returned to Virginia with a head and heart full of questions. "When I think of family, when I think of love and my deepest connections to Iraq..." he pauses, "family means so much to me and in ways that are so painful that I can't even talk about it sometimes."
"I think for me, part of the mission of Nabeel is to sort of be like, ‘okay, I am very insecure about this,’" he says. "I've always been, like all diaspora kids are in some way, insecure about my place in between cultures and feeling not Arab enough at all." Singing in Arabic, making noisy, emotional, rough-edged indie music, none of it was about fitting neatly into expectations. It was about showing up anyway.
With two EPs to the project’s discography and another on the way, Razak knows he is teetering on the edge of something special. In his work — and his even with his existence on the scene — Razak weaves together strands that have too long been held apart: Arabness and alternative music, Arabic and DIY culture, tenderness and masculinity. “I want people to feel more comfortable doing weird shit in Arabic music,” Razak says plainly. “I want to inspire more Arab artists to experiment. To unabashedly express themselves through whatever means they choose."
This week brings a slew of exciting new releases, including Ezra Furman’s Goodbye Small Head; Chloe Qisha’s Modern Romance EP; Cautious Clay’s The Hours: Morning; Aminé’s 13 Months of Sunshine; spill tab’s Angie; With Hers from Matt Maltese; and Better Dreaming from Tune-Yards.
Watch Jeffrey Martin cover Neil Young in session at End of the Road Festival
Best Fit sessions return with this new drop from our secret sessions at last year’s End of the Road Festival. The Loose Records-signed Martin hits the UK and Ireland later this month for a number of shows, kicking off with a London headline date at Omera on 29 April.
The coolest slackers of all time are back in new form with Pavements, the documentary / mockumentary / biopic / concert film about Pavement the band. It’s a history of the group, yes, but it’s also a sensory experiment like no other. It just had its U.S. premiere, so catch it in select theatres now.
The introduction…
Meet SE SO NEON, the Korean genre-bending band making waves.
Name… Soyoon
Hometown… Seoul, South Korea / Los Angeles
Age… 27
How you started making music as SE SO NEON… I formed a band because I wanted to play the songs I wrote during middle and high school at live clubs. I started performing in clubs under the name “Soyoon” in high school, and later began performing under the name SE SO NEON.
Describe your sound… SE SO NEON: vivid, life, purity, abstract, wild.
Your personal style inspiration… It seems to change depending on the environment at the time. I try to dress up just enough to not feel pressured by clothing. These days, just a white T-shirt, jeans, and well-crafted glasses.
Favorite place you’ve been on tour… Hollywood Palladium in Los Angeles. It was a very large venue, and since it was near the end of the tour, I remember pouring out all my energy. It’s now the city I call home!
What you miss most about Korea when you’re away… A sense of routine and the right temperature and humidity. My body is quite sensitive, so it’s not easy to adapt to new countries and climates. I miss Korea’s proper humidity and temperature!
SE SO NEON’s latest single “Twit Winter” is out today.
Every week, we share recommendations from the Best Fit community — one from the past, another from the present. This week, Pip Blom, namesake and front woman of the Dutch trio of the same name, shares her thoughts Metronomy’s Nights Out (2008) and Lucre by Dean Blunt and Elias Rønnevelt (2025).
Nights Out is one of my all-time favorite albums. It’s one of the first albums I discovered on my own, and I still listen to it regularly. I love all the sounds—the melancholy, the melodies, and the lyrics. I’m not sure how he’s done it, but almost every single part of each song strikes a chord with me. It’s slightly out of tune, but so, so good. My favorite song is “On Dancefloors,” but I highly recommend listening to the whole album. It’s a masterpiece!
Lucre is a super short album (only 15 minutes long) and was recommended to me by my partner. I was hooked from the first listen. I really love how the music has this distant, almost cool vibe to it, but at the same time, the singing is raw and emotional. That contrast really works for me. The combination of the two gives the album this unique, captivating energy. Track 5 is an absolute earworm—definitely one of my favorite songs to be released this year. It’s one of those tracks that just sticks with you long after it’s over.
Listen to the week in new music by following our Discovery playlist
Dropping at midnight every Thursday, follow our playlist for a taste of the best new music from the most exciting breaking artists. Leading the selection this week are new tracks from shortstraw., Keo, Will Paquin, Gatlin, and coverstars Tracey.
“Of all the restaurants I’ve built, the Odeon is my favourite. Unfortunately, it now belongs to my ex-wife.”
Nabeel is a great discovery !