Zoumer announces new EP ‘Life Delay’
Zoumer | Photo credit: Samuel George Wilson
Danish-Algerian artist Zoumer shares details of her new EP, Life Delay, with ‘Round and round’, its first single, out now through Big Oil. The six-song EP is due out in March 2027 and follows her second album, e.a.l. (euro arab lovergirl), released in March 2026 to support from The Line of Best Fit, Pitchfork, GAFFA and Dazed.
Listen to ‘Round and round’ here
Zoumer is the project of Yasmina Derradj, a producer, singer-songwriter and artist from Copenhagen. Her work sits between experimental and pop, and moves between reality and fictional storytelling, a thread that starts with the name itself. It is taken from Lalla Fatma N’Soumer, the 19th-century freedom fighter who led resistance against French colonial rule in Algeria. When composing, Zoumer imagines characters and scenes as if writing a screenplay, including the title character of her latest album, e.a.l. (euro arab lovergirl), as well as honestygirl and euro trash girl, which she reworked with Chicks on Speed. Dazed Middle East described her as "somewhere between an intimate diary and a widescreen pop fantasy.”
‘Round and round’ was recorded with Daniel Zakaria Shooshtari on drums and co-producer SATNAV (Sebastian Zieler) on guitar and bass. The song draws on the imagery in the lyrics of ‘El Ouda Mensiye’ (The Forgotten Room) by the Lebanese singer Fairuz, which Zoumer hears as both nostalgic and liberating. It is about moving through memories in a non-linear way, and how something can belong to the past and still feel close enough to return to. Warm and familiar, ‘Round and round’ carries the alt-pop sensibility of Zoumer’s earlier work while moving somewhere harder to place, drifting between dream pop, soft rock and electropop, with experimental, ambient touches around the borders. It is her most committed use of live instrumentation yet, with woodwind textures and plucked guitar woven in alongside layered, breathy vocals and backing harmonies, lightly treated in a way that keeps the pop gloss without losing the intimacy. The track is ethereal and thoughtful, the soundtrack to a moment where a small, intimate detail matters more than the big celebration happening next to it.
The single features mishmish, whom Zoumer met online after discovering her song ‘Bayez’. They connected through shared interests and creative alignment.
“I wanted to explore new ways of sharing my songs, especially after I started co-producing and discovered how much I enjoyed it,” says Yasmina Derradj. “I thought it would be fun to collaborate with artists I could imagine co-inhabiting the same musical universe as a particular song with.”
Life Delay exists in a park, amid humid air and cool shadows, in the space between freedom and nostalgia, restlessness and calm. Hair is let loose, shoelaces are untied, a puzzle is almost complete, and the expression ‘Fiha khir’ (There is something good in it) becomes a mantra. The title describes the feeling of stepping into life a little later than others, not as something sad, but as a liberating realisation that life does not follow the same timeline for everyone.
Each of the six songs explores a different way of experiencing life. One reinterprets a letter written by Alfred Stieglitz to Georgia O’Keeffe in 1917, and another enters the world of Fairuz’s The Forgotten Room. A third is a confident assertion of boundaries, while a fourth expresses a feeling of surrendering to life’s uncertainties. The music is built around drum machines, live-recorded drums and guitars, percussion, simple MIDI woodwinds and horns, field recordings and minimal melodic arrangements. Across the EP, the symbol of the spiral recurs: life as non-linear, and a return to places and emotions in order to understand them in new ways. It was made around the idea of finding stillness in motion, for listening alone in a park, on a train with headphones, or while cycling somewhere.
Yasmina points to Tirzah, Oklou, Sneaks, Air, Khotin, Fatima Al Qadiri and Yasmine Hamdan as recent listening, alongside Copenhagen’s local music scene.
Life Delay follows the most widely reviewed release of Zoumer’s career. e.a.l. (euro arab lovergirl) was built from collages of percussion, field recordings, voice notes and vocal freestyles alongside recorded oud and a sampled qanun. It earned a 7.4 from Pitchfork and five stars from GAFFA, The Line of Best Fit wrote that “Zoumer is on the rise”, and Dazed Middle East described the album as “somewhere between an intimate diary and a widescreen pop fantasy”
Zoumer has performed at Roskilde Festival and on festival stages across Denmark, as well as in Portugal and France. Her debut album, Green World(2024), arrived alongside an audiovisual exhibition of the same name and received unanimous praise in the Danish press. In 2023 she won a solo prize at Charlottenborg’s Spring Exhibition, which led to an invitation to exhibit in Politiken’s Lobby.
Life Delay tracklist:
1. Under trees
2. Round and round ft. mishmish
3. Dare to talk
4. Lying in the park
5. Pearls on a string
6. Spring tune (Fiha Khir)
