Rasha Nahas is a Palestinian multidisciplinary artist, musician, songwriter, producer, composer and actress working across music, film and theatre. Born in Haifa and working between Berlin and New York, she emerged from Haifa’s underground counterculture and has built an artistic world shaped by poetry, rock’n’roll, Arabic song traditions and performance.

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A guitarist and songwriter, Nahas began playing classical guitar at ten and by her teens was writing and performing her own songs. The guitar remains foundational to her work, while her songwriting moves between punk-rock, singer-songwriter influences and spoken word. Her experience as a Palestinian ’48er shapes her relationship to storytelling, place and belonging.

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Nahas’s debut album, Desert, released in 2021, emerged from the period in which Nahas left Haifa for Berlin. A theatrical rock record, it traces the experience of leaving home and establishing oneself elsewhere. In 2023, she followed with her sophomore album Amrat, released through UK independent label Cooking Vinyl and recorded at 67Studio in the occupied Golan Heights. Amrat brought together some of the founding musicians of Palestine’s independent scene. It was followed by sold-out release shows in Germany and an extensive international touring cycle across five continents. 

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Nahas’s upcoming third album Lime Tree شجر الليمون, was produced by Grammy Award-winning musician and producer Meshell Ndegeocello and Nahas, and recorded at The Bridge studio in Brooklyn, New York. Lime Tree شجر الليمون is Nahas’ most ambitious work to date. The album is a personal reflection of the state of the world today, shaped by questions of resilience, ancestry, memory and intersectionality. At its centre is the question of what it means to stand in one’s own position, experience and identity in a rapidly changing world.

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Musically, Lime Tree marks a significant expansion of Nahas’s sound. The production is spacious and precise, allowing the weight of the musicianship and the detail of the songwriting and guitar work to remain at the center. The record reflects a growing maturity in Nahas’s craft, with a strong emphasis on poetic language and lyrical precision, moving through punk, alongside electronic & percussive textures, spoken word and intimate ballads while pushing further into the territory of energetic Arabic rock. 

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“This record for me is very much punk rock driven, not only genre wise, necessarily, but also as energy and spirit, as an expression of a critical defying force to the current global reality..”

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Built around a powerful live band, the arrangements expand Nahas’ musical language while remaining rooted in the stories & places it comes from. The album moves fluidly between Arabic and English. This bilingual movement is an essential part of Nahas’s artistic language: the shifts between languages create different emotional registers and allow the songs to inhabit multiple cultural and sonic spaces simultaneously.

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From the hooky guitar lines and vitality of the opening track “Baby”, to Nahas’ punk-rock take on boundaries in messy relationships in “Toksik”, to the ancestral tribute anthem “Once Upon a Time in Palestine”, the record carries the listener through seasons, a journey in the “in between” that is both in motion and deeply settled in the present. Creating temporary moments of ground, hope, and love, the record becomes a work of art that both affirms the future and finds comfort in the past. “Home will stay, even if they took the house. Play with fire, play with fire,” Nahas sings as she closes the record with “Nar”.

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“With this record I really let go for a moment and let the music lead, and the songs themselves asked to be performed in a specific energy. The team in the studio was brilliant, I leaned into it and was able to really let go and trust that what we’re creating, even though it’s a bit in a new territory for me, it felt very familiar, real and I trusted that it will resonate accordingly”

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Nahas is building an artistic world that moves between the underground and the international stage, between Haifa, Berlin and New York, and across music, film, theatre and visual culture. At its heart is a belief in making space for a distinctly Palestinian voice in the pop-cultural imagination without sanding down any of its edges.