Nemah Hasan, who goes by the stage name Nemahsis, has always known the power of her words — she acknowledges that her tongue can be “lethal.” Many of the singer’s early memories are marked by the sound of her mother’s cautionary or “bass” (بس), an Arabic word that’s often used to mean “stop,” or in the case of her mother: “Watch yourself.”
“I can’t hold my tongue,” she tells Teen Vogue, Zooming in from her car in Toronto. “I always joke that people wouldn’t want me at their dinner parties, because no matter where I am, I’m always the one to address the elephant in the room. It gets me into so many situations.”
It’s not surprising, then, that her viral debut single, the blistering piano ballad, “What If I Took It Off For You,” was her frustrated response to a major brand that she says didn’t pay her for a campaign, telling her that the exposure would be good for her community, according to Hasan. Her airy soprano voice has a way of dethorning topics that might seem too unwieldy, from her mother’s journey as a Palestinian refugee in “immigrants tale,” to her own experiences growing up as a Muslim hijabi in Canada on “suicide.”
At 30 years old, the singer acknowledges that her outspoken tendencies have their consequences. But she’s made her peace with that. She’s had to.
Last fall, Hasan was living out the dream every singer-songwriter hopes for. Her debut EP, eleven achers, had been well-received, and she was about to close out her North American tour when she learned that Stevie Wonder would be in attendance. With his stamp of approval, the floodgates opened, and record industry executives soon came knocking with offers.
She says she signed with a label in October and was preparing to release her debut album, but she was then dropped. On October 7, Hamas militants in the Gaza strip launched a surprise attack into Israel, after which Israel ordered a complete siege of Gaza. On Twitter, Hasan didn’t release a formal statement, but shared a handful of posts on the topic, including one drawing attention to the millions of Palestinian civilians in Gaza cut off from food and water. In another tweet from October 9, she simply said, “free palestine.. obviously.”
According to Nemahsis, it felt like everything had changed. Labels that she says had eagerly flown her out from Toronto, and praised the demo of her debut album, were now radio silent. The few that did pick up her calls told her they just couldn’t see a way to market her — she was too “controversial.”
Hasan took stock of her options. She had been planning out her debut album since November of 2022, methodically sketching out every detail. She had the concepts for music videos, a schedule of releases, and several tracks ready to go. She even had a name: Verbathim.
A riff on the word “verbatim,” the name was a tongue-in-cheek nod to her sharp tongue, but also a way of saying, “Mark my words, because I chose them carefully.” She’d landed on the title months earlier, but after her experiences in 2023, it became even more fitting. Without much else to lose, she moved forward with her plans, now as an independent artist, shooting her album cover in January of this year. In the black and white photograph, she’s dressed almost like a nun, with her tongue held by a friend just out of frame.
Growing up on the outskirts of Toronto in the years after 9/11, Hasan and her family were acutely aware of their identities as some of the only people of color in the small town of Milton. While Milton's Muslim community has steadily grown to roughly 23 percent over the past 20 years, they made up less than one percent of the population in 2001. When her mom would go out in her hijab, Hasan says, she was often dismissed or treated rudely, until one day, she put on a black hijab with a white headband underneath. Suddenly, people were opening doors for her, wishing her a good day, and some even called her “sister.” “That’s when we realized they thought she was a nun,” Hasan recalls. “It was like she’d discovered this loophole, where she could still be herself.”
For most of her life, Hasan has grappled with the contradictions and tensions that come with being the “first” or the “only” in any given room. She’s hyper-aware of her every move, her every word, because she knows the stakes are inherently higher for her. It’s why she’s such a meticulous planner. “Other people get a lot of chances to succeed, but I only have one shot,” she says. “That’s why I really have to think before I talk, and I move through the world like I’m playing chess. I’m good at what I do, because I have to be. It’s not necessarily how I want to live, but I can lose everything I’ve built with just one bad move.”
Hasan brings up the communications theory that it takes just seven seconds to form an impression of someone. She readily admits that people often find her intimidating or intense, but sitting back in the driver’s seat of her car, she’s nothing but warm and thoughtful. Mostly, she’s unreserved. Dressed in a cool mauve hijab, with her rectangle-framed glasses, she’s surprisingly open about how much she’s returned to what those seven seconds meant for her as a child.
“People wouldn’t sit next to me or use the same pencil after me in school, because they thought I was dirty,” she says. “I didn’t have friends, I didn’t talk much, but I just really wanted people to like me.”
Just a few days before our call, she had stumbled onto an old box of pictures from those years. There were only a handful left, because she had ripped up most of the others when she was younger. Recounting the memory, her eyes began to well up. “I just looked so awkward and out of place.”
But starting in second grade, she started visiting her family in Palestine. Nearly every year, she would travel back to Jericho in the West Bank to see her mother’s side of the family, or occasionally out to the mountains where her father’s family, Bedouin nomads, live. She looked forward to riding motorbikes in the streets with her cousins, and sitting down to eat her grandmother’s falafel, the flavorful golden rice in her maqluba, or a plate of warak enab (stuffed grape leaves).
“When I went to Palestine, it was so crazy, because I was in a world full of people that looked like me,” she says. “[In Canada] I was the ugliest person in the world, but in Palestine, I was a cool kid for the few months I was in school.”
She became convinced that her hijab had been part of the secret to making friends in Palestine, and decided to start wearing it to school back in Canada. For a few weeks, she kept it squirreled away in her backpack until she got to her bus stop, hiding it from her parents, who she says were afraid she would be bullied for it. Soon, her teacher was reporting back to her mother that Hasan had come out of her shell. She became the class clown, she started singing, dancing, and making friends.
“Even now, I have this idea that no one will like me if I’m not wearing my hijab, because I saw it as a superpower,” she says. “I thought that was the trick. But as I got older, I realized that that’s just what it took for me to feel comfortable enough to let my personality shine.”
Throughout Verbathim, Hasan wields her vulnerability like a knife, opening herself up and exposing many of these old insecurities and fears, from being tokenized to not being enough to not being in control of how people see her. She opens the jangly and bright track “You Wore It Better,” with the line “Don’t get close, you’re gonna hate me.” And on the chorus of “fine print,” she belts out “I don’t wanna let in the outside,” preferring to stay invisible, and sheltered from the people who want to use her, or control her.
With a voice like a meadowlark, she delivers these crushing truths with the indie and alternative pop sensibilities of Mitski and Fiona Apple. Largely abandoning the piano-driven ballad style that made her a viral sensation, Hasan has opted instead for her own take on late 2000s-tinged nostalgia, penning songs that underscore the triumphs and tragedies of coming of age. There’s the soaring freedom of “coloured concrete,” the cynical edge of “Dead Giveaway,” and the crushing vulnerability of “Spinning Plates,” a track that calls to mind FKA Twigs’ “Cellophane.”
Though Hasan’s family in Jericho are located roughly 70 miles northeast of the Gaza Strip and Israel’s aerial bombardment, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) has reported increased levels of settler violence in the occupied West Bank since October 7. This past spring, Hasan returned to Palestine to check in on her loved ones.
On the final days of her trip, her manager asked her if she’d thought about filming a video for her album there. She didn’t have a team, she didn’t have any concepts, but within 24 hours, she connected with director Aram Sabbah, and recruited her relatives to help. She decided to record the video for “Stick of Gum,” a twinkling, upbeat track that opens with her slightly sardonic voice singing, “I swear if I showed you a song I made, you’d say it’s not your taste / If anyone else but me made it, it’s a masterpiece.”
The final product is a touching tribute to her family home, as the camera lingers on the balconies, rooftops, and streets of Jericho. “It’s perfect,” she says. “I wouldn’t change a thing.”
The song was originally intended to be the final track on the album, until Hasan decided at the last minute to change it to “Chemical Mark,” which she calls “her deepest song.” It was inspired by a study she’d read about the impacts of trauma. In a study of mice, scientists found that exposure to stress could leave a chemical mark, something that could be passed down across generations.
Over the last year, the singer has watched the decimation of Gaza along with the rest of the world. The Gaza Health Ministry estimates that more than 40,000 residents have been killed, and according to the United Nations, at least 1.9 million people across the Gaza Strip have been displaced. “We’re about to be a year into this,” she says. “There are probably already marks on my heart, on all of our hearts, of what we’ve been enduring.”
Just a few days out from the album’s release, Hasan knows that she’s chosen a more difficult path for herself. Since last fall, she has gotten a few offers from other labels, but she says most of them were lowballs. On her own, things are harder. Nemahsis has to rely on her audience to help promote her songs, and count on word-of-mouth. She sees this album as her final shot at a career she’s been planning out for years, and if it is, she’s glad it’s on her terms.
“The industry has created a beast,” she says about her recent obstacles. “I’ve missed how many meals? What’s three more? My entire existence is a risk. I know that not everybody is going to understand me, or like me, so if you don’t, I won’t take it personally. I’ve let all of that go.”
