Faouzia on Independence, Film Noir (fin) & Embracing Her Identity

“I did not want to lose myself,” Faouzia says.

Last year, the 25-year-old singer-songwriter found herself at a crossroads. She had been dropped from her label, relationships in her personal life were unraveling, and she was being asked to leave music behind.

“I was being told to be something that I was not,” she recalls. “I was asked to abandon what made me, me…I cannot move on in my life without music, and I cannot move on in my life without being an artist. That’s not something that really leaves you.”

Known for her cinematic pop sound and commanding vocals, Faouzia has cultivated a global audience, including more than 3 million followers on Instagram.

She goes on, “I knew that if I looked back many, many years down the line, and I abandoned this part of myself, I would never be able to live with myself. A part of me would have died.”

Instead, she wrote.

The result was “Film Noir,” an album shaped by a period when, as she puts it, “my whole life fell apart.” On Friday, she releases “Film Noir (fin),” an expanded version of the project featuring three new songs, a week after dropping her latest single, “Birthday.”

“I had the album name before I even wrote the album,” she says. “Each little song in my album was going to be its own film.”

She envisioned the project as a fully realized world, with each track functioning as a scene within a larger story.

“It was dark, it was emotional, it was dramatic, it was cinematic,” she says. “I felt like it was just one large movie in one huge saga just unfolding.”

The themes that run through “Film Noir” — identity, belonging and self-preservation — had been with her long before she began writing the album.

Born Faouzia Ouihya in Casablanca, Morocco, she moved to Canada with her family as a baby and grew up in Carman, Manitoba. For most of her childhood, she commuted to school in the French Canadian community of Notre-Dame-de-Lourdes before finishing high school in Carman.

“I was the only non-white kid in my school for a very long time in my town,” she says. “I was different, and I knew that I was different from a young age…I wished I could be like the other kids.”

Then something shifted.

“I was like, ‘You know what? No, actually I’m happy to be different,’” she says. “I think this is actually what makes me who I am.”

That realization extended to her name.

“When I was younger, I just remember nobody being able to pronounce my name,” she says. “I wished that I had something that was more digestible.”

Eventually, she saw it differently.

“I realized, actually I don’t know anyone else with my name, which is pretty cool,” she says.

Named after her grandmother, keeping Faouzia as her artist name became a conscious choice.

“It might be difficult for people to learn, but when they do, it’ll be set in stone,” she says. “Hopefully now, for the next generation, they’ll see that name and be like, ‘Oh, someone else did it, and so that means it’s possible.’”

Music was always part of home. Her parents filled the house with celebrated Arab artists like Fairuz and Umm Kulthum, alongside Moroccan genres like Gnawa and Chaabi — and, she recalls with a laugh, “pan flute covers of The Beatles.”

Faouzia gravitated toward pop stars like Lady Gaga, Beyoncé and Ariana Grande before becoming drawn to folk music and its storytelling.

“I was so captivated by it,” she says. “How can they tell such an intense story in two, three minutes, but you feel all the emotions they felt?”

She also spent 11 years studying classical piano.

“The first song that I have documented on paper, I wrote when I was 6,” she remembers. “My mom still has it, and it was a song about self-love and acceptance.”

Long before millions of streams, Faouzia uploaded YouTube covers and original songs. Years later, a cover of The Weeknd’s “Starboy” would surpass a million views, while one of her original songs reached a million streams.

“I was in a tiny town in rural Manitoba,” she says. “Who are these millions of people who have seen this video?”

The instinct to build worlds extends beyond music.

Faouzia has long viewed fashion as another creative language — “a visual space for an artist to express themselves” — and another way to shape how audiences experience a song.

She has developed a relationship with Valentino, first performing at one of the house’s events in Marrakech, her first time performing in Morocco, before attending its Haute Couture show in Paris in January.

“It was just so beautiful,” she says of performing in Morocco. “It was a big milestone.”

Whether through music videos, tour visuals or what she wears onstage, she’s drawn to immersive experiences.

“I personally love when artists have a visual and a sonic world built into one,” she says. “I want it all. I’m super greedy. I want to see, and I want to hear, and I want to feel, and I want everything.”

Now, the listeners who first discovered her through YouTube are showing up in person.

This summer marks Faouzia’s first tour in four years — and her first as an independent artist. Based in Los Angeles, the run will take her across Europe and North America, including Morocco, where she will play her first public shows in the country where she was born.

“I’m doing the biggest venues I’ve ever done,” she says. “I’m just so excited to see everyone face to face.”