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In a studio hangar just outside Cairo, weeks before the release of his new album The Man Who Lost His Heart, Marwan Moussa sits with a resolve that only grief teaches. The kind shaped by someone who’s been to the depths of loss and carried back not just a song, but 23. The album wasn’t built overnight, Marwan Moussa explains to Billboard Arabia in his exclusive May cover interview. It was carved out of grief and shaped with intention. Each track, he says, was sculpted from the turbulent, shifting emotions he experienced during the long and winding journey of healing after the heartbreak of losing his mother two years ago.
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The album, he says, was “a kind of therapy.” Like writing a journal, sleeping on it, then reading it with fresh eyes to look at his life from a different perspective.
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The Man Who Lost His Heart doesn’t open with a bang; it opens like a dream taking shape. “Try to remember” is the first line we hear, fighting its way through an ethereal sound design. Structured in five parts, the album mirrors the five stages of grief – denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance – but more than that, it charts the long, slow work of survival. Moussa doesn’t just document his pain; he invites you into it, offering a guide and companionship with each track.
“It isn’t a linear journey, of course,” he explains. “You could be angry, then suddenly find yourself depressed, and then all the way back in the denial stage.”
But the album isn’t merely a chronicle of grief. It’s a sonic deconstruction of Moussa’s process. Blending trap-shaabi (a genre he helped popularize that combines trap beats with various textures found within Egypt’s popular folk music), heavy synths, tender melodies and deeply personal sound bites – including audio lifted from childhood VHS tapes of him and his family – he crafts a layered, emotional landscape.
The Man Who Lost His Heart isn’t just a collection of songs. It’s a reckoning.
Take his track “BOSAKBER,” which spirals through memory and misfire. His flow isn’t clean; it’s distorted and fractured like a freshly broken heart. In the accompanying video, directed by Youssef Haridy, Moussa appears alone beneath a wide, empty sky. He fights his own reflection. The imagery is both surreal and stark, but not hopeless. It’s not the portrait of someone broken – it’s the portrait of an artist in the whirlwind of putting themselves back together, even if the pieces no longer fit the way they once did.
“We wanted to create a surreal imagery that feels deeply rooted in oriental aesthetics; something distinct,” Moussa says.
Moussa is not new to transformation. Over the last several years, he’s become one of the most influential voices in Arabic hip-hop – not only as a rapper, but as the producer behind dozens of hits, including “Brazil,” and more recently “Kebda” for longtime collaborator Afroto. He’s also been a constant on Billboard Arabia’s Artist 100 chart for over 55 consecutive weeks.
Moussa first set foot on Egypt’s hip-hop scene in 2016, releasing his early tracks on SoundCloud. The following year, his collaborations with Abyusif on “La2 Mafeesh” (No, There Isn’t) and “Zaghzaghto” (Tickling) brought him into the spotlight, and his skills as both rapper and producer began to further solidify.
In 2018, he released his first music video for “Kiki,” which marked his production breakthrough. Then came “Fr3on” (Pharaoh) in 2019, with its unpredictable rhymes and sharp wordplay over a solid beat and advanced production techniques.
Marwan Moussa
Amina Zaher/Billboard Arabia
Marwan Moussa
Amina Zaher/Billboard Arabia
After experimenting with several genres, Moussa’s 2019 track “El Bosla Da3et” (The Compass Is Lost) marked a turning point not only for his career, but for Egyptian trap as a whole. It was one of the first tracks to experiment with fusing shaabi and trap, paving the way for the rise of trap-shaabi, as it became known subsequently.
His 2021 album Florida cemented his reputation as an innovator, blending regional rhythms with experimental production in a way few dared to. From songs like “Tesla” and “Sheraton” to shaping his own catalog to producing for Egypt and North Africa’s most respected MCs, Moussa has always known how to bend sound to feeling.
But The Man Who Lost His Heart, released in full on May 5, is different. If Florida was Moussa pushing his craft’s limits, this album is what remains when all else falls away – just music, message and the strength found in the breaking.
That strength is amplified by a slate of carefully chosen collaborators. The album features standout moments with producer El Waili on “Yamma” and Afroto, as well as verses from Lege-Cy on “Klameny Belel.” But it’s Donia Wael’s contribution that Moussa calls essential to the record’s emotional core. “I want Donia Wael’s voice on the album to be interpreted by each listener in his or her own way—as a girlfriend, friend or therapist,” he says.
“The reason the album came out this way,” says Moussa, “is that I thought if I give through the five stages of grief, maybe it helps you get through what you’re dealing with or get past a tough time in your life or your current period of depression.”
In that way, The Man Who Lost His Heart is more than an act of expression. It’s an offering. A hand on your shoulder there to remind you that no stage of sadness lasts forever, even when it feels like it might.
For Moussa, producing an album this emotional, meant risking everything: the cool detachment of a hardened rapper. What he’s delivered instead is something harder, and far more lasting. A document of heartbreak. And perhaps, in doing so, he has found his heart again, and his voice.
Marwan Moussa
Amina Zaher/Billboard Arabia
“Many Nashville publishers sold their firms, then cried swampfulls of crocodile tears all the way to the bank when they suddenly became multimillionaires.” That’s a 1988 hot take on country’s corporate makeover from Gerry Wood, a former Billboard Nashville bureau chief and editor in chief who passed away on May 3 at the age of 87.
Wood had worked in radio and PR before Billboard, and he was a character and the staff knew it. A 1988 retail convention photo identifies him as “Gerry Wood (back to camera — for a change).” From 1975 to 1991 — minus 1983 to 1986, when he worked elsewhere — Wood burned up the pages of Billboard with comprehensive reporting and crisp writing about country’s mainstream moment and how it changed Nashville.
Taking Root
“Country music has been spreading like kudzu,” Wood wrote in the Oct. 16, 1977, Billboard. “That’s the Southern vine that grows so fast it is rumored to be the cause of missing cows and pigs on Southern farms. Spawned in this fertile, blood-red soil of the South, this music has vined into the cities and countries where today’s frenetic, polluted environment grasps for something fresh, yet traditional. Often, that something turns out to be country music.”
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Head Games
This “was the year the music business stopped believing its own hype that it was a recession-proof industry,” Wood wrote in the Oct. 13, 1979, issue. Country seemed to fare better than other genres, though. “When CBS Records corporately cut some 300 heads, only one of those heads dropped in Nashville.” Some of that safety came from commercial crossover potential. “Lord knows,” Wood wrote, “if it keeps up, we’ll be seeing Gene Watson wearing KISS makeup with a flaming guitar.”
The Year Country Broke
“We’ve got to find some new words,” Wood wrote in the Oct. 18, 1980, issue, as Kenny Rogers and Urban Cowboy spurred a stampede toward Nashville. “All of the adjectives and adverbs have been used in past years. Best year. Exploding. Record-setting.” Not only had country “gone California and Texas and Tennessee,” Wood wrote, “it has gone Ohio and Canada and New York.”
Alphabet Soup
“Once upon a time Nashville was as easy as ABC. Now it’s as complex as SBK, BMG, TNN, CMT, WCI, and PolySomething.” So wrote Wood in the Oct. 15, 1988, issue. “The sleepy Southern village that gave America music from its soul in the ’50s and ’60s became the darling of corporate overtures in the ’70s and succumbed to the almighty dollar in the ’80s.” Even as Music City changed, Wood’s wit didn’t. “Too old to play musical chairs, Nashville has lately taken to playing musical managers,” he wrote in the same issue. “Artists have been dropping managers at the drop of a chart bullet.”
Next Big Thing
In the June 30, 1990, issue, Wood wrote a column “predicting the Roy Rogers of the ’90s.” His bets were prescient: Clint Black, Garth Brooks and Alan Jackson. One prediction, “country rap,” was decades ahead of the curve. But his crystal ball had one crack: “Willie Nelson’s Cowboy Channel will get off to a slow start, just like Willie did, but end up a winner, just like Willie did,” he wrote of Nelson’s planned cable network. It never even launched.
This story appears in the May 31, 2025, issue of Billboard.
After each individually holding the record, Kendrick Lamar and SZA combine forces to claim the longest-running No. 1 on Billboard’s Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart as their collaboration “Luther” reaches an unprecedented 23rd week at the top. The crowning feat, on the list dated June 7, dates to the chart becoming the singular standard genre survey […]
ABBA‘s Björn Ulvaeus is working on a new musical using artificial intelligence. According to Variety, during a talk at SXSW London on Wednesday (June 4), the 80-year old Swedish pop legend said he’s tapping into AI because he believes it is an excellent creative tool.
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“Right now I’m writing a musical, assisted by AI,” Ulvaeus said, noting that he’s about three-quarters of the way through the creative process on the unnamed project, the follow-up to the hugely successful pop quartet’s avatar stage show, Voyage.
“It’s fantastic. It is such a great tool,” Ulvaeus raved of AI. “It is like having another songwriter in the room with a huge reference frame. It is really an extension of your mind. You have access to things that you didn’t think of before.” Unlike many in the industry who fear that AI is an existential threat to their existence and the traditional creative process, Ulvaeus is aware of the bugs in the system, which he said have helped him to merge AI with his already formidable songwriting skills.
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“It’s lousy at [writing a whole song]” and “very bad at lyrics,” he said about his AI helpmate, which has allowed him to navigate through some creative dead-ends. “You can prompt a lyric you have written about something, and you’re stuck maybe, and you want this song to be in a certain style,” he said. “You can ask it, how would you extend? Where would you go from here? It usually comes out with garbage, but sometimes there is something in it that gives you another idea.”
Ulvaeus is part of an eclectic lineup for 2025 SXSW London, whose lineup includes Erykah Badu (as DJ Lo Down Loretta Brown), Tems, Mabel, Alice Glass and many more. Penske Media Corporation (which also owns Billboard) and the film and production company MRC invested in SXSW in 2021 following the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic; two years later, Penske took majority ownership of SXSW.
The AI project, whose ultimate form has not yet been announced, is part of Ulvaeus’ ongoing partnership with Pophouse Entertainment, the company behind the ABBA Voyage production. The Voyage virtual residency opened in London in May 2022 and is slated to run through January 2026. The show is a combination of 10 live performers and digital avatars of the four ABBA members, who have not performed live since their split in December 1982; the group, which also features Agnetha Fältskog, Benny Andersson and Anni-Frid Lyngstad, released their first album in 40 years, Voyage, in November 2021.
Though Ulvaeus is happy to use AI in the creative process, he is also adamant about fighting for artists’ rights in the rapidly evolving digital age. “These AI models wouldn’t exist without the songs that we wrote,” he said.
Primary Wave has partnered with The Cars to acquire the rockers’ artist royalties, the company announced today (June 4). The deal, which encompasses classic rock staples such as “Just What I Needed,” “My Best Friend’s Girl” and the Billboard Hot 100 top five hits “Shake It Up” (No. 4) and “Drive” (No. 3), follows Primary […]
Mariah Carey likes living on the edge. In a teaser announcing her new single Wednesday (June 4), the Songbird Supreme beats around no bushes when describing her type: dangerous. In a video posted to her social media accounts, Mimi sits behind the wheel of a luxurious car and poses in a “Type: Dangerous” tank top […]
Gracie McGraw — the daughter of country superstars Tim McGraw and Faith Hill — would like to set the record … well, not straight, but you get it. In a since-expired post to her Instagram Stories on Monday (June 2), McGraw posted a photo with the words “everyone get more gay now” written in bold […]
Following in the footsteps of Hannah Montana and The Cheetah Girls before them, it’s time to meet your new favorite fictional Disney pop stars: Electric Bloom. The new musical comedy series Electric Bloom tells the story of how three budding BFFs — Posey (Lumi Pollack), Jade (Carmen Sanchez) and Tulip (Ruby Marino) — became “the […]
KATSEYE, which recently notched their first Billboard Hot 100 hit with “Gnarly,” is set to perform that feisty song on the 2025 Kids’ Choice Awards. The show, with Tyla hosting, is set to air live on Saturday, June 21, at 8 p.m. ET/PT from Barker Hangar in Santa Monica, California.
KATSEYE, a Los Angeles-based girl group (Daniela, Lara, Manon, Megan, Sophia and Yoonchae), has been steadily building its fanbase over the past two years. With members from the Philippines, South Korea, Switzerland and the U.S., KATSEYE is often described as a “global girl group.”
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The group first formed through HYBE and Geffen Records’ The Dream Academy competition and artist development program, later chronicled in the Netflix docuseries Pop Star Academy: KATSEYE.
The group received two nominations at the 2025 iHeartRadio Music Awards: favorite K-pop dance challenge for “Touch” and favorite on screen for Pop Star Academy: KATSEYE.
The group made Billboard’s 21 Under 21 list for 2025 and has been named an Artist to Watch for 2025 by VEVO, DSCVR and TIDAL.
In September, KATSEYE attended New York Fashion Week for the first time. In November, joined by the L.A. Rams Cheerleaders, they performed on the MAMA Awards at Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles. In December, they performed on select dates of the iHeartRadio Jingle Ball concert. This year, they were added to the performance lineups for L.A.’s Wango Tango in May and Lollapalooza, scheduled for August in Chicago.
“Gnarly” is set to appear on KATSEYE’s second EP, Beautiful Chaos, which is due June 27 via HYBE x Geffen Records. The group’s first EP, SIS (Soft Is Strong) — which featured contributions from such A-listers as Ryan Tedder, Omer Fedi and Blake Slatkin — reached No. 119 on the Billboard 200.
Now, they’re the first performers announced for an awards show whose young teen fanbase will overlap to a large degree with their own EYEKON fan army.
Nickelodeon is calling the show the biggest party of the summer. It is certain to have more epic slimings than any other show. Kids’ Choice Awards 2025 will simulcast across Nickelodeon, TeenNick, Nicktoons, the Nick Jr. channel, MTV2 and CMT, and also air on Nickelodeon channels around the world.
Leading the pack with four nominations each are Ariana Grande, Lady Gaga and Kendrick Lamar, followed by Jack Black, Dwayne Johnson, Selena Gomez and Jelly Roll with three apiece.
First-time nominees include Gracie Abrams, Zach Bryan, Jordan Chiles, Frankie Grande, Cynthia Erivo, Doechii, Keith Lee, Chappell Roan, Shaboozey, Shohei Ohtani and Florence Pugh, among others.
Big Machine Label Group is set to celebrate its 20-year anniversary with a Big Machine 20 concert in downtown Nashville on Aug. 29, featuring performances from Sheryl Crow, Riley Green and Brett Young.
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The free-to-the-public celebration’s will kick off the rebranded Borchetta Bourbon Music City Grand Prix NTT INDYCAR Series Championship weekend, and will include the fifth annual Freedom Friday event to honor military members, police, fire, first responders and frontline members. In 2024, the Freedom Friday event drew 118,000 attendees to Nashville prior to the NTT INDYCAR Series event.
“This year’s event has even more meaning as we celebrate 20 years of Big Machine,” said BMLG founder, chairman and CEO Scott Borchetta in a statement. “Nobody could’ve predicted our incredible success in a city we love so much. This is our thank you to Nashville and all the fans of our amazing artists and their music. This is going to be a once-in-a-lifetime event and one we’ll never forget!”
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Other performers on the lineup include newcomer Preston Cooper, as well as artists who have been part of Big Machine Label Group’s two-decade history, including The Band Perry, Danielle Peck, Danielle Bradbery, RaeLynn, Jimmy Wayne and Jack Ingram.
Borchetta launched Big Machine in 2005, following roles at labels including MCA Nashville and DreamWorks Universal. The label’s current roster includes Tim McGraw, Midland, Thomas Rhett, Rascal Flatts, Brantley Gilbert, Carly Pearce, RaeLynn, Jackson Dean and Lady A.
Along the way, the label has also been an advocate for artists’ rights, with Borchetta launching the “Music Has Value” campaign and working with terrestrial radio broadcasters to earn sound-recording performance royalties for the label and its artists.
The label’s biggest alum, Taylor Swift, is not named among the Big Machine 20 event’s participants. Swift has not been aligned with the label since leaving for UMG’s Republic label in 2018 and following the 2019 sale of Big Machine Label Group — including the pop superstar’s recorded catalog — to Scooter Braun’s Ithaca Holdings. In 2021, HYBE bought Ithaca Holdings. Swift recently regained ownership of her master recordings.
