Ones2Watch Home

Everyday, Everything Is At Stake. Literally, all the time, that next moment, that next action could cause it all to go wrong and ruin your life. What do you do? Do you collapse under the pressure, or do you dance through it because you might as well anyway. That’s what Thoom has been doing on her new record Everyday, Everything Is At Stake which is out this Friday and produced with 100 gecs’ Dylan Brady. 

Thoom, aka Zeyab Marwan, has spent the entire span of her career refusing to stick to one genre. Born in Beirut, she left at 11, eventually landing in Chicago, where a fine arts degree from the School of the Art Institute pulled her into the city’s DIY-noise underground and in 2016 she started producing her own music. Her early work on Club Chai’s Blood and Sand fused field recordings and Arabic composition with industrial grit; by 2020’s Pork, self-released on her own label Career Whore, she’d drifted into murkier, more spectral electronics. Since then she’s zigzagged through mellow grunge that’s reminiscent of Kurt Cobain, hardcore-adjacent noise, and on last year’s “December Forever” she leaned into a brighter, more pop-facing sound that still keeps one foot in the wreckage. If there’s any connection between it all, it’s velocity: Thoom moves fast enough that genres won’t ever catch her. 

Dylan Brady’s credit on this record feels like the last piece of the puzzle, his signature is all over the tracklisting, the maximalism, the willingness to let a track buckle under its own hooks, are a perfect companion to what Thoom’s already been building toward. This isn’t an underground artist borrowing prestige from a bigger name; it’s two people who’ve spent years warping pop from the inside and finally ending up together to make a project together. 

Thoom’s been garnering attention before we even got to write this piece, which is exactly why she’s one to watch. When she announced the project, Addison Rae showed up in the comments section leaving a comment that says “incredible,” Clairo even liked the post, and Arca (an artist who never co-signs lightly) even posted herself singing along to Thoom’s incredible “December Forever.” This is the sound of a specific corner of the pop underground recognizing one of its own, not the manufactured moment it might appear as if you don’t look deeper. 

There’s also more to come from Thoom on the way, as she heads out on the road this September and October for the North American “White Flag” tour alongside Bassvictim, and this year she’s set to release a full album recorded entirely in Arabic, produced by Bassvictim’s Ika Clateman. This collaboration is representative of a return to some of Thoom’s earliest collaborators, like the Clateman twins who worked on Pork. If there’s one thing Everyday, Everything Is At Stake sounds like, it’s an artist orbiting towards home and pulling everyone else further in along the way. 

Catch Thoom on Tour with Bassvictim starting in September. 

Listen to Everyday, Everything Is At Stake below: