When Emel Mathlouthi (Instagram) takes the stage, she doesn’t sing—she conjures. Her voice is a tempest. She doesn’t confine herself to choreography, doesn’t adhere to rigid artistic direction. Instead, she surrenders to the music, letting it course through her, manifesting in raw and unrestrained gestures. For her, the stage is neither a showcase nor a pedestal. Here, sound and spirit fuse into something elemental.
Before the world came to recognize her as the voice of the revolution, before Kelmti Horra became the anthem of an uprising, Emel was just a young girl in Tunisia, dreaming. “I think my dream was always to be an artist, even before knowing what [being] an artist meant,” she shares with YUNG. Theatre was her first love. “Theatre has everything—dance, acting, music. I embraced all the arts. I loved to perform, to write, to choreograph.” A mandatory theatre class at ten years old was a revelation, dousing her in the magic of storytelling and performance. “That’s when I really plunged in, I discovered that this was really the world I wanted to be in, you know? Like onstage, offstage, rehearsing. It’s like a parallel, you know?”
Whether it was painting, storytelling, or experimenting with different vocal styles, she approached creativity with an almost sacred devotion. “I was always drawn to things that allowed me to express myself. I wanted to create worlds, to transport people,” she recalls.
As she grew, the path before her became more precarious. “I figured acting was much harder,” she admits with a laugh. “So I thought, maybe I can just do music.” It wasn’t until she was eighteen that she voiced her dream aloud. “I was talking with my best friend and very shyly, I told her like, well, she’s like, ‘What’s your dream?’ And I’m like, ‘Well, I think my dream, but please don’t laugh at me … I wanna be a singer.’ And she’s like, ‘Why would I laugh at you?’ I’m like, ‘Because that’s never gonna happen.’” But, her friend’s simple affirmation dismantled years of self-doubt.
By the time she was a teenager, she had taken to writing her own songs—poetic, melancholic, brimming with unspoken longing. She started a metal band in university, but something was missing. It wasn’t just about rebellion for rebellion’s sake. She wanted to make music that carried weight.
It was around this time that she stumbled upon the music of Sheikh Imam, the Egyptian singer who had been imprisoned for his politically charged lyrics. His words, laced with humour and defiance, became a kind of blueprint for her own songwriting. She realized that if she was going to create something meaningful, it had to be fearless.
From that moment on, she chased the dream, through obstacles, through exile, through moments of uncertainty. “There were times I thought, maybe this isn’t for me. But then I would remember why I started, why music mattered so much to me.” In 2008, she left Tunisia for Paris, not fleeing her homeland, but seeking a space where her voice could be fully realized. “Leaving was difficult, but I knew I had no choice if I wanted to create freely.”
Arriving in Paris as an outsider, she grappled with homesickness, cultural shifts, and the constant challenge of proving herself in an unfamiliar industry. “I had to fight for my space. Nobody was waiting for me to succeed. I had to carve my way into the scene.” Her music carried home with it —ancestral melodies layered with electronic textures, the ancient colliding with the avant-garde. “I like to blur the lines between the traditional and the futuristic, between the organic and the synthetic.”
She experimented with Arabic instrumentation, contorted it with modern production, sculpting something that could move beyond language. “People who don’t speak a word of Arabic, who have no connection to my culture, still feel something when they hear my music. That’s what matters.”
And when the revolution came in 2011, her voice returned home before she did. Protesters chanted Kelmti Horra in the streets, fists raised. Emel watched from her apartment in Paris, stunned. The song she had written had found its way back home without her.
The revolution succeeded. Ben Ali fled. And Emel Mathlouthi returned.
By the time she stood on the Nobel Peace Prize stage in 2015, singing for a world that had finally begun to listen, Emel knew her voice would never belong to her alone. It had been claimed by history, by resistance.
And still, she sings. For the exiled. For the unheard. For the ones who, like her, understand that sound is never just sound—it is movement, it is memory, it is freedom. It was fire. It was a force that could move mountains. And Emel Mathlouthi had only just begun.
Over the years, her performances became something otherworldly—rituals rather than concerts. The theatricality of her childhood never faded; it deepened. “I think what I’m doing right now wouldn’t be what it is if it didn’t have the drama, the tragedy, the intensity, the depths of a multi-dimensional, multidisciplinary art form,” she muses. Onstage, she is fully immersed, channelling a force beyond herself, transforming emotion into something visceral and uncontainable.
When she recently performed at the Quoz Arts Festival in Dubai, the energy electrified her. “It was amazing. Honestly, I didn’t expect, I think this is the most time that I got tagged on stories of all time. The audience was so eclectic—artists, writers, dreamers from every background. Seeing the way they captured the performance—it was like peering into a mirror, witnessing the music through their eyes,” she says. But performing closer to home carries a singular intensity. “I was so proud to have my team there, to share this with my people,” she said. “It reaffirmed what I always felt—this is what I’m meant to do.”
Even as she commands stages worldwide, Emel remains tethered to her purpose. She doesn’t create for fleeting consumption—her work is built to endure. “I don’t write for hype. I write for forever. I want my songs to be just as powerful in ten years, twenty years.” That philosophy guided her most recent album, Mra, a project crafted exclusively with female collaborators. It was a conscious rebellion against an industry still steeped in male dominance. “I wanted to deconstruct this idea that men are better at making records. Women are underrepresented, and if we don’t support each other, who will?”
Creating Mra was an act of catharsis. Recording percussions with an all-women team left her overwhelmed. “I remember I burst into tears without even realizing it. I was deeply moved. It’s like you were looking for something that you were deprived of, and you didn’t even realize how much that affected you until that exact moment.” The choir sessions were just as powerful. “We all know what’s going on. We all know what we’re lacking. We all know the injustices we go through. And I just loved to feel the sisterhood every session, session after session.”
Finding the right collaborators was a journey in itself. “Female producers, engineers, musicians—they exist, but they are often unseen, overlooked. It took time to assemble this team, but every single moment was proof of why it was necessary,” she says.
Her journey has always been about creating a legacy, she says, “I never want to be predictable. I want every album, every song, to feel like an evolution.”
From revolution anthems to experimental soundscapes, from intimate ballads to grand, sweeping compositions, the voice of Emel Mathlouthi carries through time. “I don’t follow trends,” she says. “Because when you chase a trend, you risk losing yourself. I’d rather stay true to who I am and trust that others will feel it too.” And they do.
“Music is the remedy to everything. It saves us from being trivial, from being lost, from being disconnected. And as long as I have my voice, I’ll keep singing.”
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