Indie

Self-released and small-label artists, guitar-led or made alone at a laptop, across the Arab world.

Indie here describes how the music reaches you rather than what it sounds like. In most of the region there is no label infrastructure to be independent of, so independence is the default condition rather than a stance: an artist records at home, masters cheaply, uploads it and builds an audience directly.

That makes for a broad archive. Guitar bands, bedroom pop, folk-leaning songwriters and producers who sing all sit here, and the common thread is scale and control, not instrumentation.

Artists whose work belongs to the specific Beirut and Cairo alternative scene are more likely to be under Arabic Alternative. Anything guitar-first is probably also under Rock, and most artists here carry more than one genre.