Faouzia could be Gen Z’s next big pop star

The Moroccan-Canadian singer constructed an enormous fan base and netted a Juno nomination—with out even releasing an album

Earlier this yr, Faouzia Ouihya obtained a cryptic heads-up to tune into the 2022 Juno nominations announcement. The younger singer—whose stage identify is Faouzia (pronounced Foe-zee-ya)—watched it at residence in Winnipeg on March 1 along with her older sister, Samia, questioning if the tipoff was an effort to spice up viewership numbers. “Breakthrough artist was one of many final classes introduced,” Faouzia says in a Zoom interview. “Finally my identify and face popped up and I used to be like, ‘Oh my gosh, that is insane.’ ” A month later, she says, it nonetheless hadn’t sunk in. Speaking along with her staff about what she’s going to put on to the award ceremony, she realized, “I’m going to the Junos as a result of I’m nominated.”

Faouzia is just not fairly a family identify in Canada, however this yr’s Junos would possibly change that. She’s nominated alongside well-known expertise, together with Tesher, a South Asian-Canadian artist from Regina who collaborated with Jason Derulo on Jalebi Child, which has greater than 200 million views on YouTube, and Toronto-based rapper Pressa, who has toured with Drake. Faouzia is a fierce contender herself. At 21, she already has a single with John Legend and shares an agent with Billie Eilish. Faouzia has legions of loyal followers: 3.1 million TikTok followers, 1.9 million YouTube subscribers, 1.9 million Instagram followers and over 4 million month-to-month listeners on Spotify. She’s considered one of many Gen Z artists cultivating a fan base on social media, and significantly on TikTok, even earlier than releasing an album.

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There are two causes Faouzia has attracted such an enormous following. The primary is her unimaginable expertise as a singer. Vocal coaches on YouTube rave about her vary, depth of tone, vibrato and breath management, and followers submit adoring tributes on TikTok. The second is her down-to-earth and bubbly character. In a TikTok Stay with iHeartRadio final fall, she was requested which shampoo she makes use of on her shiny hair: Costco’s home model, Kirkland, she mentioned. In a Refinery29 video section revealing the contents of her purse, she unpacked deodorant, stain remover and gum from her SwissGear backpack. “You’ll be able to catch me on campus with this bag,” she mentioned, referring to her time spent on the College of Manitoba as a pc engineering pupil. Faouzia usually posts snippets of songs on social media, singing a cappella or lip-synching right into a hairbrush. In some movies she experiments with efficiency—widening her eyes like an anime character or sporting her lengthy, darkish hair in house buns harking back to TikTok-star-turned-singer Bella Poarch.

Faouzia was born in Casablanca, Morocco, and immigrated to Canada along with her mother and father and sister when she was a yr outdated. She grew up in Carman, Manitoba—a city of three,000 folks an hour southwest of Winnipeg. “I had a lot time to do actually something as a result of it was so chilly outdoors and I didn’t play hockey,” she says. She got here from a music-loving household that listened to the largest names from the Arab music world—legendary Egyptian singer-songwriter Umm Kulthum, Lebanese songstress Fairuz and Algerian pop star Khaled. Faouzia’s mother and father put their three daughters in piano classes, and Faouzia additionally taught herself find out how to sing and discovered to play guitar and violin. She absorbed all she may from pop divas like Woman Gaga, Beyoncé and Rihanna and determined she wished to be identical to them. “Once you’re a child, you’re tremendous assured. You’ve got all these goals and aspirations, and nothing is in your manner,” Faouzia says. “As I grew older, I used to be like, ‘Am I gonna be a singer? Is that this reasonable?’ ”

Faouzia began performing in expertise exhibits when she was 5, singing and taking part in the piano. At eight, she started showing at small festivals in and round Carman, performing classical compositions—Beethoven, Chopin, Mozart. She additionally began to experiment with pop music. She launched her first single, Knock on My Door, in 2015, and two years later she gained the Nashville-based competitors Unsigned Solely, netting a prize of US$20,000. In 2017, when she was 17, Faouzia was signed to a expertise company, and simply earlier than her 18th birthday, she was signed to a document label. She now information with Atlantic Data, and her first EP, Stripped, was launched in 2020.

Hastily, the child from small-town Manitoba was being flown out to Los Angeles to jot down with a staff, later collaborating with French DJ and producer David Guetta and Swedish producer Ali Payami, who has labored on songs for the Weeknd and Demi Lovato. “It felt like I might get up at any second and be in my mattress in Carman,” Faouzia says.

Faouzia additionally writes on her personal day by day, and has credit as a composer and producer on her work. Through the pandemic, she carried out on the Kelly Clarkson observe I Dare You, which Clarkson sang in six languages with artists world wide. “I grew up singing her songs,” Faouzia mentioned in an interview with ET Canada. “Listening to her sing in Arabic was simply so particular.”

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One other pinch-me second was collaborating with John Legend on the ballad Minefields. Faouzia recorded the observe on her personal, however her staff had the thought of including a robust male vocalist to accompany her. They despatched her recording to Legend and heard again every week later: he beloved it. Per week after that, he recorded his vocals. “It was the quickest, best collab ever—he was simply so concerned and invested,” Faouzia says. The method occurred over Zoom, however the pair lastly met when the video was shot over two days in late 2020. Because it was launched in January 2021, the video has been considered over 72 million instances on YouTube.

Faouzia’s star is shortly ascending: Rolling Stone, Selection and Individuals have all flagged her as an artist to observe. She’s been flown out to Egypt for a non-public occasion, invited to a Chanel present in Dubai and attended her first New York Style Week earlier this yr. Faouzia took final semester off faculty to work on an eight-track launch known as Residents, which comes out in Could. She constructed anticipation for the primary single, RIP, Love—which mixes Western pop with North African and Center Japanese influences—with temporary clips on social media earlier than releasing it in March. “It’s like a mini model of what’s to return,” she says.