Lolo Zouaï has never made a record quite like ‘Reverie’, and that’s saying something for an artist who has always defied easy categorization. The genre-bending third studio album is out now via Because Music, a 14-track journey through wounds, memories, and dreams from an artist born in Paris, raised in San Francisco, and shaped by her Algerian roots, singing equally in French and English with touches of Arabic throughout.
New performance “Desert Rose pt 2” via A COLORS SHOW gives the album’s emotional core its most intimate expression yet. The track is the second part of her breakout 2019 single “Desert Rose,” and it speaks of inherited, invisible wounds alongside the strength to resist and bloom in the desert. It links the personal and the collective, connecting post-colonial memory and identity to something deeply felt and deeply private.
‘Reverie’ finds Zouaï reinventing herself after years of silence, grief, and rebirth. The production moves fluidly through alternative R&B, hip-hop, pop, and Arabic influences, creating dark, sensual, and cinematic textures across the album’s full runtime. “Holding On” processes the loss of her best friend. “3AM in San Francisco,” praised by The FADER and Rolling Stone, fuses airy vocals with punchy trap production while shifting between English and French. French-language collaborations with Dinos on “Les Mots,” Lous and the Yakuza on “Lemon Squeeze,” and Disiz on “Coquelicot” give the album a rich cultural and linguistic dimension that few artists working today could pull off with such fluency.
Zouaï has accumulated over 600 million streams, toured in support of Dua Lipa alongside Caroline Polachek on the 2022 world tour, headlined her own PLAYGIRL World Tour in 2023, and built fashion collaborations with Nike, Coach, Dior, YSL, Chanel, and Reebok. Her songwriting credits include tracks for K-pop stars NewJeans and H.E.R.’s Grammy-winning self-titled album. ‘Reverie’ is the record where all of that experience, all of that cultural navigation, and all of that hard-won self-knowledge converges into something that feels genuinely essential.
‘Reverie’ Tracklist:
- Holding On
- Angel, Give Them Hell
- 100
- Les mots (feat. Dinos)
- Baggy Jeans
- Drive
- Hiver, j’espère
- Toute seule à la plage
- Lemon Squeeze (feat. Lous and the Yakuza)
- Coquelicot (feat. Disiz)
- 3AM in San Francisco
- Tu me manques
- Desert Rose pt. 2
- Si j’avais des ailes