The Belgian-Egyptian musician sat down with Paste to discuss writing with urgency, creating intimacy through visuals, and his new album, Every Dawn’s a Mountain.
Tamino-Amir Moharam Fouad—known mononymously as Tamino—performs to sold-out crowds around the world, reaps the praises of artists like Lana Del Rey and Radiohead bassist Colin Greenwood, and graces billboards as the face of a new Hermès fragrance campaign. But in his rearview mirror, there’s a scrawny 14-year-old hunkered down at his piano, writing his first-ever song about a girl. Like countless other hymns of lovesick teenagers, it (to paraphrase the man himself) kind of sucked. That was no matter, though. From his first brush with songcraft, the Belgian-Egyptian musician was hooked.
In 2017, barely out of his teens, Tamino released his first single, “Habibi,” a song that, in hindsight, was a thorough preview of what would become the hallmarks of his distinctive artistry: sonic stylings reflecting his Egyptian and Lebanese ancestry, lyrics that channel indescribably intense feeling into tangible imagery, and a voice both virtuosic and visceral. I’ll never forget hearing it for the first time in my senior year—the moody minor chords, feverish poetry, and skyscraping falsetto transporting me from the dry, fluorescent heat of my high school library. After the song ended, I hastily sent myself a text, in part to ensure I wouldn’t forget about the artist who’d granted momentary refuge from the pits of pre-class dread, but also to vent the ever-exhilarating thrill of discovery: “TAMINO!”
Nearly three years later, when I meet “Mino”—as he’s identified in the lower-left corner of my laptop screen—over a video-call in June, he’s between legs of an extensive North American and European tour in support of his haunting third album, Every Dawn’s a Mountain (released in March via erēmia/Communion Records). Even on my slightly blurry screen, the 28-year-old exudes the same poise and style as in photoshoots and in concert, sporting a mint-green collared shirt, a delicate silver chain, and a silver bracelet revealed by the occasional hand gesture—but even so, he isn’t the intimidating presence one might expect. The warm smile he greets me with immediately dispels my nerves, and he wears it often throughout our conversation. Despite being a self-professed introvert, he absolutely lights up when talking about music, graciously receiving and expanding upon my own interpretations of his work. Before I know it, our interview creeps past the hour I’d scheduled.
Tamino calls from his former home in Antwerp, Belgium, where he wrote the earliest fragments that would become Every Dawn’s a Mountain over two years later. Considering his characterization of the album as “a metaphysical altar for what had been lost” in its accompanying biography, I ask if he’s willing to expand upon what, exactly, had been lost that compelled him to compose such a work back when he lived in this same home. He admits that, throughout the press cycle, he’s been hesitant to divulge specifics about that pivotal period, fearing that doing so would water down the record into a “one-dimensional” work for listeners, particularly because the experience of loss is anything but. “I think it really contains multitudes,” he muses, “and even the form of grief, and of letting go—it has taken many forms.” He pauses, before reflecting on how he’s felt the songs “transform” as he’s performed them. It seems only natural that they’d acquire deeper meanings with time—especially as listeners have refracted the aches and awe they hold right back to him by singing along. As a result of sitting with the work alongside his audience, Tamino’s initial guardedness has begun to dissipate: “I do feel a little bit more confident now to give more context,” he says, “and I also realize that a little bit of context is welcome for people.” Anxious not to seem prying, I insist that he shares only what he feels comfortable with. But he briskly waves away my concern: “No, no, no! I really see the importance of it now, and I appreciate the opportunity.”
In the fall of 2023, Tamino relocated across the Atlantic, from Antwerp to New York City. It was far from a hasty decision; since 2022, he had taken numerous month-long visits to the city to confirm he wasn’t making a monumental mistake. In retrospect, he can say the move was inevitable: “It was an ‘I’m already hooked’ kind of thing,” he says. Thanks, in part, to his earlier test runs, it didn’t take him long to adjust to life in Manhattan; he even tells me it feels like he’s lived there far longer than he has. But that is not to say, of course, that uprooting his life and moving 3,000 miles from home was easy. “I had left it behind before, when I moved to Amsterdam when I was 17 [to study music at the Royal Conservatory], but it’s so close to home that it’s different,” he explains.
The move was only one of several major life changes that threw Tamino into what he calls a “state of complete disorder.” Soon before leaving Antwerp, he and his girlfriend of seven years separated. Around the same time, one of his close friends died. “I met him around the same time my relationship with my ex started,” Tamino says. “It was suddenly like these two very big chapters in my life came to an end, and they started at the same time, as well. We’re talking a period of seven years, which, according to many people, that’s like a cycle in your life, where all your brain cells are fully changed, or replaced.” Tamino is a self-professed lover of such “synchronicities”—a more pleasant one he mentions later is that New York used to be called New Amsterdam—although, he clarifies, he’s hesitant to “symbolically draw” connections between these coincidences. “But, I mean, we’re talking about the album,” he concedes, “so, yeah, [that’s] inevitable.” Tamino may not be a critic, but he’s well-versed in teasing out those symbolic connections in his own work, readily examining his art from multiple angles.
This level of care, however, can be a double-edged sword, often resulting in self-consciousness and perfectionism—and endearingly, Tamino is no exception to that rule. About 20 minutes into our conversation, he smiles sheepishly, “I try to avoid my own music as much as possible.” As a fan, I admittedly can’t resist blurting out, “Really?” He shrugs it off. “Yeah, I can get deeply insecure when it comes to finished work. I stand behind it—I stand behind it 100 percent. But it’s hard to…” He pauses, considering. “It depends on my mood, let’s put it like that.”
If Tamino is his own biggest critic, that’s only symptomatic of the thoughtfulness with which he creates and understands his art. As much as he might feel an aversion to his own music, he discusses it freely, with the fervor and artistry of a poet—and, frankly, the thoroughness of a music critic. He’s patient and precise in choosing his words, often translating his thoughts into vivid metaphors (he analogizes the construction of songs to a child’s eager assembly of a Lego set, and compares the refinement stage to the process of painting a full-scale house) and tracing elegant throughlines across the chapters of his life and discography. After I note how the title of his new album relates to that of his last, Sahar—an Arabic word that roughly translates to “just before dawn”—he draws an even closer connection between the records. “Even the last line of the second album is ‘Before I step into darker days,” he points out, alluding to Sahar’s devastating closer, “My Dearest Friend and Enemy.” “I mean, that song was already hinting at a separation and at a struggle that would follow. Looking back on that last song of that album, that last line, the title of the record, I think [the title of the third] is all the more fitting.”
However, Tamino didn’t start writing with the album title already in mind. Instead, the record’s title track—where the phrase is taken from—spilled out of Tamino almost as soon as he realized it was there. “When I started writing, it was like giving birth—like, ‘It’s coming, now!’ Like, ‘I have to give birth to this song right now; otherwise, it’s gonna die,’” he laughs. When he finished the song, the lyric “every dawn’s a mountain” stood out as a natural choice for the song’s title. “At some point in the weeks after, I started contemplating it as a potential title for the album,” he says. “And I did think, like, ‘Oh, yeah, my previous record also was related to dawn,’ and I started seeing a symbolic beauty to that: ‘just before dawn,’ and ‘Every Dawn’s a Mountain.’”
Fittingly, Every Dawn’s a Mountain feels like a logical continuation to Sahar in its composition as well as in its title. Over email, Tamino explains that Sahar stemmed from a reflective state, with him positioned as an observer. He was a narrator suspended in a liminal space; as he puts it, “The day had yet to begin. The real challenge was waiting.” Ripe with anticipation and sober in its questioning, Sahar was unwavering in its tragically futile grasps towards connection—it felt as if it was forever approaching a dawn that never breaks.
On the other hand, Every Dawn’s a Mountain evokes the stillness of finality—the moment the sun broaches the horizon and reality is laid bare in the eerie quiet of the morning light. “It’s a pretty heavy album to listen [to] all the way through, maybe,” Tamino reflects. “But it’s really what I had to make. I think you feel throughout the album that to arrive at a place of acceptance—which I do feel is way more present in the last two songs on the album—you have to go through a lot of pain to get there.”
This resolve is embodied best on the record’s penultimate track, “Dissolve.” Against fuzzy synthesizers and orchestral strings, a slender melody played on Tamino’s oud (a Middle Eastern ancestor of the lute) ambles forward with patient determination, gently guiding Tamino to peace with grief. “A line dissolves between each soul / That I will come to weave in my song / More, and more, and more,” he exhales in the final chorus, imbuing every syllable with faith. Tamino’s promise to move past his grief while holding onto what he’s lost—or, rather, by holding on to it—feels like a profound turning point on the album, and it reminds me of something Bob Dylan (one of Tamino’s musical idols) sang, not long before the dissolution of one of his own major relationships: “And though our separation, it pierced me to the heart / She still lives inside of me, we’ve never been apart.”
But although “Dissolve,” as Tamino says, “feels like where we journey towards in the album,” he believes it was actually the first song he wrote for the record, back in early 2023. “It’s a good example of how weird songwriting is sometimes, and how predictive it can be,” he says. “Sometimes, you’ve already reached acceptance in a song before you’ve reached it in your actual life.”
Tamino says that throughout the writing stage for Every Dawn’s a Mountain, songs continued to arrive with a sense of “urgency.” For him, the foundation of a song surfaces similarly to a mid-meditation revelation—he’ll mess around on an instrument until a chord progression, melody, or even just a sound breaks through the din. He singles out the knotty, oud-based riff on the dreamy mid-album stunner “Raven” as an example. “That’s a riff that I had for years, and I just never could write it into a song,” he recalls. “But I knew it was a special riff, and then, finally, I made it work.”
While recording the album from the winter of 2023 through early 2024, Tamino and his collaborators (producers PJ Maertens and Eric Heigle) found that the album had “a self-building quality,” which shines through on the final master. On hushed numbers like “Elegy,” delicate melodies seem to unravel with minds of their own, not unlike how the title song poured from Tamino before he could fully grasp it. Often, it feels like they’re guiding Tamino through the wide-open soundscapes, granting the record that feeling of intimacy typical of home-recorded demos.
That’s not to imply that the album feels unfinished, or that it’s less atmospheric than Tamino’s earlier releases. However, it is less immediate—as Tamino acknowledges, it’s “maybe more of a ‘grower.’” This feels especially true in comparison to his debut record, Amir: none of the new songs are as intoxicating as, say, heady story-song “Indigo Night,” nor as sumptuous as “Sun May Shine,” which drapes itself over you like a tapestry. By contrast, Every Dawn’s a Mountain is an album you have to settle within, a mostly-empty house so quiet that even absence feels like a presence. The relatively sparse arrangements heighten the vulnerability of Tamino’s lyrics, denying listeners (and himself) refuge from the rawness of grief. “I think when there’s less of an urgency, there’s more room for conceptual thinking,” Tamino says, explaining his scaled-back approach to the music on Every Dawn’s a Mountain. “There was just no room for that in these songs. The feeling [of urgency] was so clear and so strong that it already formed these songs and already colored them. It would have been inappropriate to approach [the album] from a conceptual place.”
The listening experience works rather like the introspection Tamino practices in his lyrics: the more time you spend in the quiet, the more you hear inside it. If you listen closely to “Willow,” in which he analogizes the conclusion of a relationship to the deaths of the willow trees he and his ex-partner cared for—“Obviously, it’s my melancholic, somber disposition that reads into that and is like, ‘Oh, that must mean that without her, I bring forth doom, or death,” he laughs—you’ll hear the hiss of studio feedback, gurgling synthesizers, and scratches of static; experimental flourishes that lend the dirge the quality of a grainy film photograph torn at the edges. Other intricacies throughout the record, like the shiver of a haunted-sounding violin foreshadowing the ultimate eruption of the epic lament “Babylon,” slowly unspool over time. With each listen, the deceptively simple arrangements become increasingly expressive, seeming to convey feelings as complex as the lyrics they backdrop. “I like when there’s a looming undercurrent under what appears to be very beautiful and ethereal. I like that contrast,” Tamino says. “I like when there’s still an element of danger to a pretty song.”
“A lot of that came from the musicians as well, just creating noise,” he continues. “We [used] so many pedals, so [the album is] quite layered. I think a lot of the elements that we recorded ended up being part of that undercurrent more than they’re part of the surface, so that the surface level…all it has room for is the words and for the main melodic and harmonic elements. I do think there’s a very intimate quality to that, especially when you listen on headphones by yourself, where suddenly this richness is exposed in that intimacy.”
That intimacy extends to the music videos released in advance of the album (for “My Heroine” and the singles “Babylon,” “Dissolve,” and “Willow”), all of which are live recordings solely featuring Tamino and, depending on the song, his guitar or oud. Watching the clips—directed by Tamino’s longtime collaborator and “best friend” Bastiaan Lochs—can feel like eavesdropping: casually dressed and unshaven, Tamino appears to be entranced by his music, demonstrating no awareness of the occasional honking car or squawking bird, let alone the camera lens and audience it prefigures.
This sense of closeness is particularly striking from an artist who hasn’t shied away from theatrical productions—videos accompanying singles off of Amir and Sahar featured sets that could’ve come from storybooks, dramatic chiaroscuro lighting, group choreography, even a classic walking-alone-pensively-through-a-crowd-in-slo-mo scene. Tamino says he understands fans may yearn for the cinematic grandeur and theory-generating narratives of his earlier music videos—and, he tells me, he’s considering doing one in that vein to wrap up the video rollout for Every Dawn’s a Mountain—but he thinks the live videos were the “perfect” way to commence the album campaign. “They’re symbolically very important and truthful to me, because they were shot in the noise of New York that we’ve let bleed into the audio,” he says. He likens the cumulative visual and aural effect to “finding a moment of stillness in the chaos,” particularly in the case of the “Babylon” music video, in which he plays on a rooftop above the bustling city. “Even recording the audio, I saw so many people question, ‘This is not really live, is it?’” he says. “But it is really live. People don’t even know where the mics are.” (I don’t have to probe for the answer: “It’s kind of been a secret,” he continues, “but, like, fuck it—I usually don’t wear hats, but the hat is there because there’s a mic sort of hidden in the cap part.”)
It’s a testament to the power of Tamino’s vocals that, while watching that live take of “Babylon,” you don’t miss the majestic orchestral strings and thunderous percussion included on the studio cut. Admittedly, it’s difficult not to hyperbolize when describing his voice: often eliciting comparisons to Leonard Cohen’s smoky timbre and Jeff Buckley’s dazzling range, it’s a supple, stirring instrument that only seems to grow more commanding with time. Tamino understands the attention his pipes receive, but he wasn’t always comfortable with it. “I took…not offense, but I was surprised to see that the most important thing in my life, which is songwriting, when I first emerged, was not really recognized or talked about as much,” he says. “[My voice] was a very weird thing to talk about every time, because what I spend the most time doing is writing. It feels like my life is, in some sense, dedicated to the art of creating.”
Although Tamino sings with more restraint on Every Dawn’s a Mountain than his debut, there’s no deficiency of show-stopping vocal performances. An undeniable highlight in that regard is “Sanctuary,” a chamber-folk duet enlisting the vocal talent of Mitsuki Miyawaki—or, as you might know her, Mitski—who Tamino opened for on her This Land is Inhospitable and So Are We tour in 2023. “I was very, very grateful that we could add that song and that Mitski could lend her voice to it,” Tamino says of “Sanctuary,” which he co-wrote with Mitski and Alessandro Buccellati (who’s also worked alongside SZA and Pharrell Williams). “It’s also the only song where there’s an actual feminine presence physically, or sonically,” he adds. “And I think that’s that’s pretty powerful, because the presence is there throughout the album in spirit. I do think it’s cool to have it realized for a moment there.”
Some of the album’s most evocative performances, however, are of a quieter intensity. On the cleverly titled “My Heroine,” which centers around an address to an irresistible paramour and a correspondingly hypnotic finger-picked riff, palpable pain and desperation shake through Tamino’s near-whisper. Similarly, it’s his huskier rasp on the title track that draws out the vulnerability of the confessional lyrics. Tamino emphasizes that he isn’t “afraid” to unleash that breathtaking falsetto in concert, nor on record, at least not when it suits a song. “But,” he carefully adds, “I’m definitely a little wary of things becoming gimmicky—that not only concerns the voice; that also concerns anything that has to do with my [Middle Eastern] roots.”
Many a headline has condensed Tamino’s artistry into his interweaving of Arabic and Western aesthetics. (Perhaps most notably, a 2018 BBCprofile of him was titled “Tamino: the new ‘Sound of the Nile?’ in a reference to the nickname of his late grandfather, the famous Egyptian singer and actor Moharam Fouad.) Naturally, Tamino’s embrace of his Middle Eastern heritage sets him apart from other English-language singer-songwriters, and although he doesn’t want it to be his sole calling card, he is pleased that his music sparks listeners’ curiosity about classical Arabic music. “So many people that come to our gigs, they’ve never even heard of an oud. And then, it’s only there that they realize, ‘Oh, wow, what is this instrument?’” he says. “I do think it’s quite special that people are discovering this beautiful, ancient instrument, even if it is in a context where it’s not really represented in a very traditional or purist way.”
Tamino’s Arabic influence is less pronounced on Every Dawn’s a Mountain than Amir—which often featured a firqa, a large orchestral ensemble in Middle Eastern music—but it endures, even in more pop-forward tracks. After Tamino shares that learning to play the oud “has influenced [his] guitar playing,” I tell him that as I was jotting down thoughts on his new songs, I occasionally had to consult the album credits to ascertain the lead instrument, which speaks to how cohesively they blend the sounds of the cultures that inform his artistry. “I love that you say that,” he beams. “I love that, like, gray zone. Maybe, that sits a little closer to who I am as a person as well—like, it’s all blurry. It’s all not easily definable.”
He continues, “That’s another reason why I love a place like New York—where so many people come together that seem to have either an unconventional life or an unconventional background.” Though he credits his new surroundings for influencing his songwriting, he’s reluctant to classify Every Dawn’s a Mountain as his “New York Album,” in large part because the record still feels so reflective to him: “I was still looking back so much, reaching back so much.” Nowhere is that more explicit than on the effervescent closer, “Amsterdam,” an acutely detailed, nostalgic stroll through the city where Tamino came into his own as a man. “Putting that at the end [of the album] was just so fitting to me, because from the journey perspective, I really felt like it was sort of an epilogue,” he says. “Like, we’re exiting the album now, and we’re revisiting the whole origin of this story one last time.”
As for what’s next? “I have no clue,” Tamino admits. With Every Dawn’s a Mountain, he’s fulfilled his label deal; so, he’ll again search for “a new home.” “I love the people at Communion, but it does feel great to have a new chapter,” he says. “I’m just gonna take my time writing new stuff, and we’ll see… It’s all open, from here.” I can’t help but smile at that, instantly reminded of a line from the title track. It’s the album’s most assured verse, but Tamino sings it with singular tenderness: “There’s so much to see, so much to see, so much ahead of me.”
Anna Pichler has written for Paste since 2024, and she interned for the music section in the spring of 2025. When she’s not writing about music, she’s working towards an undergraduate degree in English literature at The Ohio State University. Keep up with her work on X @_Anna_pichler_ and Bluesky @annapichler.bsky.social.
