Moroccan Songstress ilham Invites You to Escape on Her ‘uhm…ok?’ EP

“I appreciate how I grew up, but sometimes I walk around and I’m like ‘damn, I do not want to be from the hood,’” Moroccan American songstress ilham tells OkayAfrica. “There's more to life. I kind of discovered music like that: I would always just listen and envision and manifest. It was escapism.” 

It’s 10 AM in New York, and she’s answering OkayAfrica's video call indoors, donning oversized black shades and perfectly sleek hair. With a speaking voice as airy and sensual as her singing voice, she tells her unconventional story from a homeless shelter in New York City to a recent showing of her latest music video in Times Square.

ilham’s parents came to the U.S. on their honeymoon. When they went to the embassy to get their return papers, her mother entered the green card lottery and won. They decided to stay and fight through the hardships of the ‘American Dream.’

“I have the utmost respect for them,” ilham repeats several times. “My mom doesn't speak English, so I don't know how she does it. She goes outside, throws a little sign language to people, and I'm just like, ‘God bless you.’”

They were placed in Queenbridge projects, where ilham had a fun childhood despite the poverty. “I always knew that it was my job to get them out, so I naturally became ambitious,” she says. “I’m sure many immigrant kids feel that way. I just want them to be able to breathe and be like, ‘wow, we came here for a reason.’”

Sure that she was destined to be an artist, ilham tried to avoid university and only applied to Ivy League schools. “When I got into Cornell, I started crying, because I was sad,” she remembers. “But I thought if J. Cole did it, I can do it.” 

She graduated a year early and returned to NYC, but in the meantime, she had a deal with a recording studio owner in Astor Place: for every six hooks she wrote him, she’d get one hour of studio time. 

“Now, I know it was a big request, but I was always just writing and trying to record myself,” she says. “The process of putting on headphones for the first time and listening to your voice already took up an hour. So I thought, damn, okay, I'm coming again.”

Her hard work paid off; ilham’s debut EP, 41-10, was featured on Issa Rae’s Insecure, and her follow-up, with time, soared to #1 on iTunes’ Top R&B Albums Chart. Then, unexpectedly, she parted ways with her team and went on a two-year release hiatus. 

“I wish I didn’t have to take that break,” says ilham. “Consistency is important, and if you’re from the hood like me, you gotta keep dropping. But I was trying to get the business handled.” 

Looking back, this involuntary break was important for ilham to regroup, find the right producers, and really get into her sound. On September 19th, she is finally releasing her independent EP, uhm...ok?

When she got back into the studio, ilham recorded her first new song, “No Testing,” which closes out the EP. “I touch on the hardships of being a North African female in the industry, and I was getting emotional and whatnot — I’m a Cancer, I’m naturally a sad person,” she says. “But eventually you have to get up and make a change from within, to get your head right.” 

This change is what led her to uhm…ok?, a mentality of two perspectives. The first uhm...ok? used to be ilham when she was hurt or sad, stuck in her head, trying to make sense of things that don’t make sense. “The second one is: if someone says something negative to you, all you can say is uhm...ok? and keep it pushing,” she explains. After she’d gotten the first one out of her system, ilham decided to intentionally create music that people could escape to; no more sad records. 

Instead, ilham is seen all over NYC with her crew of beautiful women, singing about the roster she is building, demanding that a true lover give her everything, seducing and calling out players. Her sound mixes early 2000s R&B, trap, and dance music, interwoven with her signature breathy vocal lines.

ilham is aware that there aren’t many other North African women embodying this type of sex appeal and confidence. When she performs in a t-shirt in the colors of the Moroccan flag, she wants to create the representation that she believes is still missing in the North African music scene. 

“I’m a [Moroccan] girl from the hood that makes R&B pop music, and that doesn’t exist,” she says.

Her choice to wear that shirt prompted some backlash, but ilham is undeterred. “There’s such a double standard: in Morocco, they love Rihanna, but when their own comes out, [they don’t support]. Imagine if the Arab community embraced their own artists like other communities do, it would be over.”

uhm...ok? is ilham’s distraction to these realities an escape she has created for herself and for others. “I have never been in such a good headspace,” she says. “I'm just proud of this body of work. Every element of the project was made through love by a small group of people that genuinely believed in me. Of course, we're stressed, but blessed.”