Faouzia says she’s never taken a real vacation, but you wouldn’t know it from the way she hops worlds. “Each flight brings you to a whole new world,” she laughs, rattling off a tour itinerary that includes Kuala Lumpur, Indonesia, and a brush with actual monkeys. “It took me two days to get back home. One of my flights was 16 hours. But it was so worth it.”
Back home, she’s busy launching what she calls her Doll Summer — a run of up-tempo pop anthems with all the seriousness of a silk bow. “I’m singing like a doll,” she says, which means what exactly? “It’s so much more playful right now. In the past, I was very intense and serious — I love doing that, but this is dedicated to fun. The ballads will come back,” she promises, in case you’re worried your favorite heartbreak merchant got swallowed by a major chord.
Don’t let the bubblegum fool you, though. These songs still bite. La La is basically a pep talk to her future self: “If somebody is not good for you, anything they say from this point forward is la la and you move on,” she says. Clean your ears out, kids.
Even her cover choices tell you exactly what’s going on inside that head. Faouzia turned Eiffel 65’s I’m Blue — quite possibly the dumbest-catchiest song of the early 2000s — into a rainy ballad that’s somehow genuinely sad. “I heard the lyrics so many times, I thought, these are actually really sad,” she says. She wrote a second verse and now it’s off living its own life on Netflix, four years after she first threw it online. “That’s the craziest thing about the music industry — you never know what could get picked up.”
She’s also got her eye on Japan — “futuristic but very old-school somehow” — and she’s still writing that elusive debut album. Citizens, she says, was just a prequel. “Everyone considered it my debut, but no — that’s just the tip of the iceberg. So much more to come.”
Meanwhile, don’t worry — the calls, the “don’t call me’s,” the doll voices, the big choruses, they’re all coming. “We contain multitudes,” she grins. No argument here.
Watch the interview above and then check out the video below.
