Some artists come across as “global” because their music travels easily. Others become global almost by accident – because what they do is so functional, so physically persuasive, that it survives translation.
Omar Souleyman belongs to the second category. The Syrian singer, 59, is not someone who “crossed over” into international fame. He is a wedding singer who amplified the core mechanics of dabke – Levantine line-dance music – and, in the process, became one of Syria’s most recognisable musical exports.
From local weddings and community events in Syria’s north-east to appearances at Glastonbury in 2011, the Nobel Peace Prize concert in 2013 and Balenciaga’s after-party during Paris Fashion Week in 2022, his journey has been singular and phenomenal.
That is why the new Gorillaz single Damascus, released last week and credited to Souleyman alongside Damon Albarn and Yasiin Bey, lands as more than a headline-grabbing collaboration. It is a track that places Souleyman’s voice – its urgency and repetition – at the centre of the composition.
Souleyman speaks exclusively to The National about the collaboration and his musical journey. “Of course, I was pleased that Gorillaz reached out to me, because they are a huge band,” he says. “Even though I felt the weight of responsibility in front of such a major group, the conversation through music was easier than a conversation through words.”
The “new Gorillaz rap” element comes via Bey, but the gravitational pull belongs to Souleyman – an artist whose entire career has been built around communal motion, and who now finds that motion echoing through one of pop’s most influential collaborative projects.
The aim of the song, Souleyman explains, was to enter a different musical sphere. “That’s why, through this collaboration, we wanted to create a third musical space – one that isn’t about blending as much as it is about a professional musical dialogue.”
Souleyman frames the project not as novelty, but as a meeting of equals – and an act of musical space-making. “I don’t think Gorillaz chose me because I’m a famous name, but because I serve the band’s idea of experimentation and breaking traditional moulds,” he says. “The collaboration was a mutual addition: I bring the voice and the musical background, and they give me an important, well-known platform to present my art.”
A career built on the physics of weddings
That idea of a “third space” offers a useful way of understanding what sets Souleyman apart. His music has always operated as a bridge without becoming a compromise: deeply rooted in local celebration culture, yet structurally compatible with music far beyond the region – a folkloric form of electronic music that breaks boundaries.
To understand why Damascus matters with Souleyman on it, you have to start where he did: not in studios, but at celebrations.
Born Omar Almasikh in 1966 in Syria’s north-east, near the Ras al-Ayn borderlands, Souleyman began as what the region has always understood him to be – a working wedding singer. In that ecosystem, music is not a prestige object or a branding exercise. It is a service, a social contract and a kind of endurance sport. The task is to hold a room – sometimes for hours.
That setting shaped everything about his sound. Souleyman’s instinct was to recognise that the essence of dabke – its insistence, its communal logic, its trance-like build – could be intensified rather than softened.
Before streaming platforms and international festival bookings, his catalogue existed where many regional catalogues did: in recordings of live performances, duplicated and circulated through informal local networks. Souleyman was prolific in a way that later made his rise appear sudden to outsiders. The catalogue was always there; the wider world simply did not know where to look.
Tracks such as Warni, Warni and Weno became pop-culture touchstones, circulating online alongside viral images of the singer Photoshopped in front of global landmarks, from the Eiffel Tower to the White House.
Souleyman rejects the idea of an “overnight” global breakthrough. “In truth, I didn’t move from local to global in a sudden way,” he says. “It happened through an accumulated journey of successes – from singing at popular weddings, to performing for Arab communities in Europe, and then to world stages. It’s been a gradual path.
“This experience didn’t change me as a person or as an artist as much as it made me more open to the different audiences I now deal with – while still preserving the authenticity of my art and my loyalty to the Euphrates roots I started from.”
Why Damascus carries extra weight
Against that backdrop, Gorillaz naming a track Damascus and centring Souleyman is not a neutral act. Damascus is more than a city: it is a symbol loaded with antiquity, power, memory, war, loss and survival – often filtered through Western imagination.
The difference here is that Souleyman is not simply a Syrian voice placed into a concept. He brings with him a distinct cultural mechanism: dabke as collective propulsion. The title can be read as nostalgia, solidarity, cinema or provocation, but Souleyman’s presence anchors it in something practical and human – the idea of a community moving together, even when that community is scattered.
Asked about legacy, he returns to the idea of protection rather than exposure. “I’m open to any experience that helps spread the Euphrates art I represent. I’m keen to protect it,” he says. “I hope my artistic legacy will be this folklore that I came from and succeeded through.
“I tried, as much as I could, to carry it to the world in a simple, popular way that represents a wide segment of my society, environment and folklore.”
Strip away roll-out language and symbolism, and Damascus ultimately lands as a reminder of what Omar Souleyman has been doing all along: exporting a feeling that does not require translation. His music is often described as hypnotic, relentless and euphoric – accurate, but incomplete. A more precise description is this: he makes sound that turns individuals into a collective.
That is why his presence on a Gorillaz single matters more than the novelty of the feature credit. It is not that Gorillaz “discovered” him; Souleyman has been globally significant for years.
Damascus is not important because it references a city. It matters because it amplifies an artist who has spent decades mastering the most serious kind of music-making – the kind that holds people together, and, in Souleyman’s own telling, protects a living folklore as it travels.
