שלום עליכם · وعليكم السلام
"Someone asked us once if we're a peace project. We said no — we're a pop duo. That's the whole thing."
Two young Mediterranean women, eighty kilometers apart on the same coastline. Tamar Haddad, 22, Yemenite-Israeli, from Rosh HaAyin. Leila Khalidi, 23, Palestinian, from Haifa. They met at a maqam workshop in February 2024 and haven't stopped writing together since. The hook is whether it makes you dance.
Two voices, two languages, one coastline.
Grew up five streets from her grandmother Sarah, learning Yemenite diwan singing in Judeo-Yemenite Arabic before she met pop music. Her signature is Yemenite melismatic vocal ornament applied to modern pop phrasing — a Middle Eastern flavor that resists easy placement.
Tajweed study and the occasional Sufi dhikr circle from six to sixteen — both traditions built on the same maqam vocabulary; oud with her uncle Ayman from ten; University of Haifa B.A. in Composition with a thesis on maqam in contemporary Arab pop. Her grandmother Samira was born in Haifa in 1936 and stayed through 1948.
Beit HaGefen, Haifa — February 2024. The "Maqam / Mizmor" workshop, led by Amal Murkus and Dudu Tassa. Day three: a compositional exercise on a mode shared by both traditions — Hijaz in Arabic, Ahavah Rabbah in Jewish liturgy. Same mode, two names. Four minutes of music became forty-five. Amal's comment: "Whatever this is, keep doing it." They kept doing it.
A July 2024 phone video of them performing the Salam/Shalom hook at Leila's kitchen table — oud on her lap, Tamar harmonizing — crossed 6 million views in a week. WAVELENGTH signed them in October.
Same Semitic root, S-L-M — peace, wholeness, well-being.
SALAM / SHALOM is not a peace album. It is a pop album by two young Mediterranean women who happen to have grown up in two languages that share a root. The songs are about Friday nights, grandmothers, bad-idea crushes, 3 AM doubts, and the specific feeling of going to bed at sunrise after a good party. The shared-Semitic-cognate hook is the album's structural device.
Six structural devices that recur across the record.
Most choruses pivot on two words that share a Semitic root — Salam/Shalom, Layla/Laila, Habibi/Yakiri, Beyt/Bayit. The cognate is the song.
Leila's oud threaded through 808 sub-bass — the traditional and the modern in one rhythmic bed. Present on 7 of 10 album tracks.
Hijaz and Bayati modes — the shared modal vocabulary of Arab muwashshah and Jewish piyyut. Same mode, two names.
The lead single structures its verses as a greeting in Hebrew answered in Arabic — the ritual form embedded in the arrangement.
The Arabic goblet drum as the rhythmic spine — warm and physical under contemporary pop production.
Both Tamar's Yemenite grandmother Sarah and Leila's Palestinian grandmother Samira are sampled with permission on two album tracks.
How they navigate the work — in their own words, repeated across interviews.
No music talk in the kitchen. Borrowed from ÀSÌKÒ. The kitchen is for eating and talking — nothing else.
To political press questions: answer once, in plain language, do not elaborate. "We don't write about politics. We write about daily life. Politics is in daily life, so it's in the songs."
Neither member has ever been photographed with any national flag. They wear each other's cultural signifiers freely; they never wear national symbols.
"I don't walk onstage carrying a flag. I walk onstage carrying a microphone. If somebody wants to read me as a flag, that's their problem. I'm here to sing."
— LEILA, The New York Times, March 2026
Portraits, studio moments, and the two videos from the shoot.
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