InterviewMazMars Picked A Word You Might Not Know. That Was The Point.
Ahy Ana is afrobeats, it came together overnight, and he chose a title he knew most people would have to ask about. He played it for us before it dropped.
Watch the videoMazMars came into the MDLBEAST Radio studio a few days out from a release, which is usually when an artist is at their most guarded. He spent most of the conversation explaining his own title instead.
Ahy Ana, out with Shancoty on 27 May, takes its name from a Sudanese term of endearment. Not a phrase that travels, not one most of the region would recognize. Ninyaz reached for the local equivalent to get at it, the way you might say ya labeeh here.
He chose it because you would have to ask
Most artists pick a title people will understand instantly. MazMars went the other way on purpose.
He said the word is simple, and that anyone who hears the song without knowing it will stop and ask what it means. That question was the plan, not a side effect.
Afrobeats was always the home for it
The word is affectionate, and that settled the genre for him. Sweet talk over afrobeats was the fit he heard immediately, and once he had it, he did not deliberate.
Ninyaz’s read was that he had blended the two ends of it, the language and the sound, into the same idea. He did not disagree.
It took a day
For a song built on that much thinking, the making was fast.
MazMars said Ahy Ana came together between a day and a night. Once it existed, his instinct was to finish it, put it out on its own, and see what happened next.
There is an album, but this is not from it
He is working on one. Ahy Ana, though, was deliberately built as a standalone single rather than carved off a bigger record.
The album will carry features, and he was willing to say where they are coming from without naming anyone: artists out of Sudan, and one from Libya. He promised surprises alongside them, and left it there.
A music video is not ready. He had been asked about it three days earlier, and his honest answer was that it will most likely follow the song rather than arrive with it.
He used the last of his studio time to thank the people around him. Not by name, deliberately, because naming some would mean leaving others out. It had been a run of good and hard in roughly equal measure, he said, and the ones who turned up for the hard part already know who they are.
Ahy Ana by MazMars and Shancoty is out now and in rotation on MDLBEAST Radio. Tune in across the Kingdom on 104.8 Riyadh, 98.1 Jeddah, 97.4 Dammam and 87.6 Abha, or listen live at mdlbeastradio.com.
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