After bursting onto the Egyptian hip-hop scene in a contagious collab with trailblazer Abyusif, Abo El Anwar followed up with a barrage of releases that put his talents front and centre. Shuffling gloomy, juddering trap with swivelling mahraganat and references bouncing from Batman to Shakespeare within a few bars, El Anwar cleverly blurs the lines between impish and confrontational, pained and self-deprecating. He merges idiosyncratic beats with piano-laden lyricism in 2020 EP Faqret El Sa7el and poignantly captures the zeitgeist of a shifting hip-hop metropolis in Cairo 2021.