“All the beauty in you carries me, my love.” Egyptian artist Bossa, formerly known as Buthaina, He sings Softly and ethereally in Arabic on her latest pop single, Good beach (New Beach, 2025).
The crashing waves, lively bursts of pink flamingo rides, and the sea-lit glow of the music video aren’t the only images that conjure a seaside feel. There’s another coastline unfolding beneath it all; One that lives in her mind, visible only through the dreamlike haze of song and its drifting beauty.
Using old-fashioned film grain and warm, sunny shots of the coast, the song gently takes its listeners by the hand and leads them into the dreamy interior of BOSA’s mind, a place where all the beauty in the world can reveal itself through a single moment, or even through the gaze of a single lover.
It is the kind of music that one can completely immerse themselves in, or that can accompany a long, warm bath. While dream pop is often associated with Western influences from the 1980s or the psychedelic rock scene of the late 1960s, BOSA takes the genre in a different direction, showing how it can also be shaped by Arabic poetry, especially the works of Egyptian poet Salah Jaheen.
PERFORMANCE WITHIN THE Ethereal BE INDIE The visual world At the 2026 Sandbox Festival on May 8, BOSA crafted a theatrical concept that was both intimate and strange at the same time. The setting reflected the ethereal atmosphere of dream pop, elevating it from a purely listening experience to a fully immersive live moment.
“I’ve always been interested in sound that’s a bit unclear, where you don’t hear everything perfectly,” BOSA tells Egyptian Streets.
“It’s a bit grainy, a bit nostalgic, a bit dreamy, and very BOSA.”
Classical Arabic poetry and pop music
there specific The feeling that the best music is now trying to capture. It’s not quite sadness, and it’s not quite happiness. It’s like standing in a beautiful moment and actually missing it.
It was often this kind of aesthetic of longing framed Through the lens of the American singer Lana Del Rey, who built a whole world out of it, a honeyed and cinematic world, steeped in Americana and the wreckage of the American dream, imbued with a special sad melody.
But Bosa reaches the same feeling and aesthetic through a completely different door, and that door is the poet Salah Jaheen.
Jahin was an Egyptian poet who wrote in colloquial Arabic, but what? to make His unique style was his ability to capture the beauty of nature, such as the sun, the Nile, love, and ordinary faces, and turn them into beautiful moments that can be easily forgotten and carried away, making one constantly drawn to listen to them and read his poetry again and again, just to relive that moment.
Like Jaheen, Bossa draws inspiration from the beauty of nature and love, connecting the experience of loving nature with the feeling of falling in love, exploring, through her dreamy sound, how both experiences can feel fleeting yet irresistibly addictive.
“I’m really drawn to classical Arabic poetry, but also to folk traditions,” Bosa says.
“They’re both very racist. Naturally, I think these terms, like sublime art, sky, birds, myth, and all that, reflect an inner landscape.”
Listening to BOSA’s lyrics, one can feel this special mood immediately. She does not constantly try to clarify or translate the meaning behind her words, but instead allows her subconscious to do all the talking, allowing the listener to form their own interpretation of what she means.
In one lyric, for example, she softly sings: “The waves drag us away… and throw us on a new shore.” The song doesn’t try to explain what happened or put forward a clear story, but that’s exactly what makes it so captivating, because it doesn’t seek to provide any conclusions or answers.
This is how Jahin’s poetry works. He trusts that the reader will feel the unexplained or spoken, indicating something too big for language to capture, and then back away. As it is beautiful He writes In one of his poems from his famous collection The Rubaiyat (1959-1963), “How can I find a path of my own choosing, when my coming to life was not my own?”
Jahin knew how to turn life’s strange and often bizarre realities into dreamlike poetry, and Bosa does the same, only now set to music and framed in a different era.
