Zoumer: e.a.l. (euro arab lovergirl) Album Review

It’s taken some time to get to know the Euro-trash girl. We trailed her across the continent on Cracker’s rangy 1994 epic while she kept one step ahead, like Carmen Sandiego with a midline piercing. Chicks on Speed’s Y2K version gave us our first sighting, but before we could get a word in, she ducked out for a cigarette and disappeared into the night. Today, the Euro-trash girl speaks. “I got mixed-up genes, I got Arab attitude,” Yasmina Derradj boasts on her new song of the same title. Not quite a faithful cover, Derradj’s “euro trash girl” treats its source material the way an especially liberal fanfiction author might; her OC’s father is an Algerian prince who got busted for drugs in Paris and eventually landed in Copenhagen, now Derradj’s home base.

Heralded by pirate radio static and the twang of an Egyptian oud, Derradj’s second album as Zoumer, e.a.l. (euro arab lovergirl), pulls up at the crossroads of two bustling thoroughfares: electroclash’s Newport-smudged comeback and the contemporary Scandinavian school. Somewhere a savvy DJ is already mashing up her “euro trash girl” and Smerz’s “Feisty,” consecutive songs of the summer from a region that gets less than three months of it. What sets e.a.l. apart is its willful insularity; Derradj trades the collective fantasy of a Big city life for the “sound of a city only I have been to.” She’s our tour guide to her own personal World Town.

Derradj recorded e.a.l. across Copenhagen, London, Paris, and Algiers, cobbling together field recordings, voice memos, and samples of traditional Middle Eastern and North African instruments. The cadence of her writing will feel familiar to anyone who made shitty posse raps on GarageBand in high school: She’ll freestyle a hook, and if it sticks, she’ll ride it for a few bars, or else leave it in the dust. “Silver in my blood, silver in my name,” Derradj deadpans on “kayble silver,” which has her flashing her ancestral birthright like a blinged-out chain. She and her Danish contemporaries are fond of this particular move: from the esoteric to the populist and back again. “honestygirl” is a diss track with a protracted and inscrutable set-up—“I hope a midwife can give you what you need”—and Derradj takes her sweet time before dropping the punchline: “’Cause you’re a baby!”

e.a.l.’s patchwork production is a byproduct of Derradj’s country-hopping approach to recording and a synecdoche for its themes of dispersion and return. On “to the end,” the drum programming toggles between a cavalcade of bendir and darbuka and the tinniest, cheapest-sounding Hi-NRG beat. It mirrors the duality of Zoumer, the international heiress of mystery who’d rather be holed up at home with her cat. The knock against e.a.l. is that, in being so of-the-moment, it’s liable to get swept back to sea when these tides inevitably recede. If Derradj manages to dig in, chalk it up to the flecks of sentimentality that glimmer through her disaffected patina; the humble plea, “Boy, read something for me” on the incandescently strobing “say something”; or “driving (so many emotions),” an oxidized retelling of Lorde’s “Supercut.” Things that start off shiny usually tarnish. Love means scuffing them up.