Fez — NISY has never sounded interested in fitting neatly inside one corner of Morocco’s music scene.
“TRAUMATISED” was released today, marking NISY’s return to music after a year away.
The Moroccan singer-songwriter and producer has moved between R&B, UK garage, Jersey Club, hip-hop, electronic music, and Arabic influences while switching freely between English and Darija.
Born in Barcelona to Moroccan parents, Nisrine Zarqane Bezzari spent parts of her childhood in Morocco and Spain before settling in London as a teenager. That movement between places became central to an artistic identity built from several musical worlds at once. GQ Middle East previously traced those influences from Fairuz and Jacques Brel to Daft Punk, Etta James, and the sounds she encountered in London.
Now, with “TRAUMATISED,” she is turning inward.
The track draws from a year marked by grief, betrayal, attachment, and fractured trust. At its center is the death of NISY’s grandmother, whose prayers had long provided her with comfort and strength.
When NISY stops being a character
The emotional exposure of this last release marks an evolution from NISY’s 2025 debut EP, “RIP THE DRAGON.”
The seven-track project was built around killing off an older persona she called ‘NISY the Dragon’. She had associated the character with emotional restraint and keeping too much inside. “TRAUMATISED” goes somewhere less controlled.
“There was one take where I genuinely forgot I was recording,” NISY told MWN Lifestyle magazine. “I wasn’t thinking about the song anymore, I was just talking to her.”
She said the moment erased the boundary she usually feels between Nisrine, the person, and NISY, the performer.
“When I listened back, it didn’t sound like a performance,” she said. “It just sounded like love, finally finding its way out.”
The song closes with something even more intimate: her grandmother’s actual voice.
NISY chose to preserve her final voice message inside the recording rather than translating its meaning into lyrics.
“Words can describe a memory but they can’t replace her actual voice,” she explained. “If it’s in the song, it’s safe forever.”
For NISY, that decision also transforms the recording into an archive. Years from now, she said, she can play the track and hear her grandmother again.
Grief was not the only loss
“TRAUMATISED” is not only about death. NISY said the same period also dismantled relationships she believed were permanent, forcing her to confront another kind of absence.
“Sometimes it’s someone passing away, and sometimes it’s someone still alive but gone from your life in a different way,” she said.
Both experiences, she explained, forced her to understand how love can remain after the person attached to it is no longer present.
That tension gives the track its emotional backbone while its production remains characteristically restless. The accompanying press material describes “TRAUMATISED” as blending Afro-Jersey, two-step, Moroccan, and Arabic electronic influences, with NISY moving between Darija and English.
That hybridity has increasingly become her signature. Her catalog includes collaborations with Moroccan artists including Shinigami and Plylist on “KIGHANDIR,” while her 2026 single “BENT NAS” brought her together with Kartman.
Carrying the voice onto the stage
The most difficult part of “TRAUMATISED” may be what happens when the song leaves the studio.
NISY performed it live for the first time at London’s KOKO in Camden, where she appeared as Zeyne’s opening act on September 1.
When her grandmother’s voice came through the venue’s speakers, NISY said the moment felt both painful and restorative.
“I felt her energy right there with me on that stage,” she said. “It was emotional but I let it happen instead of fighting it.”
“So yes, it reopens something,” she added, “but it also heals something in the same breath.”
That may be the clearest picture yet of where NISY is heading.
