Four years ago Intibint started making a record she wasn’t sure anyone would fund. Last July she threw a fundraiser for it on her own birthday, at The Rum Shack in Glasgow’s Southside with the Arab club night WSHWSH, and told the room that the politics in her work might cost her the grant she was applying for. She got there in the end, politics and all: Half Moon Eyes comes out on 18 September through Bandcamp and SoundCloud and nowhere else, played live first at Ormside Projects in London tomorrow and Stereo in Glasgow on Saturday.
Born in London, raised between there and Sanaa and now in Glasgow, she wrote the album across Yemen, Egypt, Slovakia, England and Scotland and produced, recorded and mixed every part of it herself. Travelling, she records what she hears: that’s how trains, fireworks and dolphins from those journeys run through “Dolphin”, gunshots from Yemeni celebration footage inside “Disrespectful af”, a Glasgow trans rights protest from 2025 opening “S.A.B.R”. “Disrespectful af” was built out of an argument in which she was called disrespectful for naming racism, and “Hayati”, the one song out before release, came from working out in Glasgow that a Yemeni woman could live a life for herself. She sings in Arabic and English across the album, close to the microphone, repeating her lines, over nocturnal pop chords and production that moves between downtempo, alt-R&B, grime and EBM, with Arabic modal writing under most of it.
