How an Imagined Nostalgia Catapulted Tul8te to Global Success

A warm summer’s day, a boy with a rose on a red vespa, taking you out on a picnic date, or, if you’re lucky, on a roadtrip to the beach in his brown old-timer. He has brought his guitar, is wearing suit pants and a button-down shirt and, of course, his white crochet mask. Even though Egyptian pop sensation Tul8te is no longer anonymous, he is sticking to his mask.

As of press time, Tul8te’s COLORS performance is number 22 in YouTube’s global top music videos. He is currently on his first-ever world tour and has amassed millions of followers across social media and music streaming platforms. In the past four years, Tul8te’s music has become inescapable not only in Egypt and the region, but also across its diaspora — even though his sound is far from original. 

So, what does Tul8te do right that most other artists haven’t been able to hack? 

An imagined ‘90s nostalgia

After years of writing for other artists, Tul8te started releasing music under his own name in 2022. His first EP Maghool got hip-hop fans excited;  here was a fierce rapper doing something different in the increasingly stagnating soundscape of Egyptian rap. 

In 2024 Tul8te suddenly pivoted, exchanged his black mask for the now signature white one, and became all cutesy, romantic, and pop on his first album Tesh Shabab. “His timing was impeccable and came right when the nostalgia wave and the commercialization of nostalgia really started to come into its own in the region,” Lebanese American music journalist and founding Editor-in-Chief of Rolling Stone MENA, Danny Hajjar, tells OkayAfrica. 

“Egypt and the region are used to a lot of the sounds that he's using,” he continues. “But what he’s done is really thread the needle to make those nostalgic sounds feel fresh and give it the sensibility of a Gen Z audience.”

His sophomore album of the same year, Cocktail Ghena’y, became a cultural phenomenon and achieved unprecedented dominance on national charts, simultaneously placing five tracks in Egypt's top ten.

“The musical choices, [the Spanish guitar, the tabla, the oversaturated, analog, warm soundscape] very deliberately hark back to a specific ‘90s early 2000s vibe,” says Mahmoud El Shabba, a curator, DJ, A&R coordinator at Raad Records and co-founder of Ganoob, a music sharing platform and collective based in Cairo. “It takes a certain degree of skill to be able to repackage something well, but at the end of the day it’s largely unoriginal. The demographic he's catering to are very young, so it's interesting to me that it's an imagined nostalgia. It’s almost like painting something from memory.” 

Filling a gap in pop

The region knows Tul8te’s sound from one specific artist, the legendary Amr Diab. “But he’s a more refreshing version,” says Egyptian Tul8te fan Mariam Diefallah. “His lyrics are quirky, fun, silly and very cringy, which is a good thing. They’re not dramatic like classical Arabic songs or celebrate misogynistic shit. The peak of this misogyny is actually Amr Diab himself.”

Known as “the Father of Mediterranean music,” Diab is the most successful Arab pop icon of all time. He’s been releasing music for four decades, but his recent work is not as well-received as it was at his peak in the ‘90s and early 2000s. “There is a clear legacy-shaped vacuum in the scene right now and it’s not because Amr Diab isn’t putting out music. He is and we’re all worse off for it,” agrees El Shabba. 

While young Egyptians might no longer want Diab himself, they’re still longing for the nostalgia they associate with the kind of music he popularized back in the day. To El Shabba, this longing is a natural reaction to the current state of the world. 

“We’re not delusional about this hyper-digitized stage of capitalism, AI is literally the most pervasive thing right now,” he says. “In Egypt everyone thinks that how they grew up was the good old days, except for this generation. There’s more self-awareness and all this language around doom.”

As the first to move into this pop vacuum, Tul8te has released albums that invoke the Mediterranean summers which are encoded in Diab’s music. Both artists are hyper-commercial and played in the exclusive resorts of Egypt’s North Coast, but Tul8te has managed to create a sound and visual identity that reminds young people of simple moments from their parents’ childhood, rather than the hyper-capitalist resorts they themselves frequent. 

“Where Tul8te lands is super interesting, because it's almost a reflection of all of the bad parts of Sahel [the Mediterranean coast], but it reminds people of all of the good parts of Sahel,” says El Shabba. 

The mask then becomes an apt symbol for what Tul8te embodies to his fans: an elusive romance. “You can't see his face, and you can't really imagine the time that he's evoking either,” says El Shabba. Rather than hiding his identity for political reasons, Tul8te’s mask helps him sell nostalgia by making him an artist that listeners can project anything on.

The next Amr Diab? 

Without doubt, Tul8te is a capable and talented musician who has understood the current zeitgeist and pivoted towards nostalgia and pop at the perfect time. 

“He's one of those artists that has successfully been able to penetrate the market both in the region and in diaspora communities, and do it in a way that  feels authentic to both communities,” says Hajjar. 

El Shabba is cautious to hail Tul8te as the next Amr Diab already. “The music industry in Egypt right now feels like a game that you can hack for a little bit. His current success means very little if he doesn't sustain it,” he says. “The reason Amr Diab is Amr Diab is because, whether you like his music or not, he's been putting out music for damn near 100 years.” It remains to be seen if Tul8te can do the same, and how long this nostalgia wave will carry him.