When I found out that Adil Omar’s newest track is called Alhamdolillah, I immediately thought: here comes trouble. In this extremely polarised world, where the smallest of things can ‘offend’ groups that have a proclivity to turn violent and even deadly, a commonly used Arabic phrase that simply translates to ‘Praise be to God’, had one worried… and curious.

It would turn out that my fears were unfounded. Adil Omar’s Alhamdolillah is a celebration of life. Of personal triumph over darkness. Of overcoming his private demons and rising up again.

The track has a couple of versions online — the ‘official audio’ version has a semi-animated video attached with a peaceful Adil Omar, while the ‘lyric video’ version has the lyrics playing on the screen as the song progresses. The audio for both is the same.

Alhamdolillah is an electropop number that has Adil Omar rapping in English. It’s light, upbeat, preppy and powerful. The song’s most notable features are the catchy tune being played on the synth, and Adil Omar’s double vocals, which make his voice sound bigger and give it a far-reaching sort of effect — as if his optimistic, triumphant singing is echoing throughout the world.

In Alhamdolillah, Adil Omar is happy and grateful for where he is in life

I’ve realised most modern songs are not following a typical song structure, and at times, don’t really follow one at all. These songs are simply made up of catchy phrases, one or two catchy ‘sounds’ on repeat signifying the chorus and… that’s it. There’s nothing wrong about that approach, it is just how modern songwriting is now and it’s what we have.

In Alhamdolillah, the phrase, “alhamdolillah” is the main chorus while the rest of the verses run through and not necessarily in a clear order. Case in point below, verses taken from different sections in the song:

Alhamdolillah/ Reach for the stars/ Smile on my face/ And there’s peace in my heart.
Alhamdolillah/ Gently surrender my soul/ And now you can witness it flow.
Alhamdolillah/ I have evolved/ Mighty and strong/ Timeless and more timeless and more.
Alhamdolillah/ Praise be to God/ Praise be to all of us baby, cause/ Woah.

But breaking songwriting and song construction rules is nothing new for Adil Omar. He did the same in his song The Great Unravelling from his Mastery album. Adil Omar is nothing, if not experimental, in his style.

Back in early 2020, around the time he released Mastery, which created quite a bit of buzz in online music-listening circles when the songs from the album first started coming out, we had a conversation about his songwriting and production process.

“All of my songs reflect… it’s basically me freezing my consciousness and freezing it into audio,” he had said back then. “It’s all basically my inner dialogue, my inner voice. The different voices that I hear. It’s me channelling them.”

I’m glad the voices this time round are exuberantly, overwhelmingly positive. You can sense the joy, albeit with an attitude, in the music.

Published in Dawn, ICON, December 26th, 2021