Since her first official releases in 2018, Nadine El Roubi has been out to prove she’s no ordinary young rapper. Hopping between R&B, alternative and neo-soul, she has consistently refused to stay within genre lines, instead cultivating a fertile personal creative space to examine themes such as politics, self-love and identity. Two years after the unabashedly outspoken FREESTYLES, Pt. 1 in 2022, her latest release, Freestyles, Pt. 2: A Mixtape!, is a refreshingly swerving, incisive compilation of freestyles that initially saw the light as a series of videos on social media. Speaking to Apple Music, El Roubi reveals that she first got into hip-hop feeling “in awe of how many concepts and ideas a rapper could fit into a song, while making it all sound so cool”. In response—with her spirited experimentations, languorous tunes and supple, sensual vocals—the rapper now drops bars loaded with pithy commentary and sharp-edged wit. “Themes like politics, identity—and everything that falls in between and underneath—are what I feel most affected by and therefore most inspired by,” she explains, adding that she explores “everything I am” in her music: “The search for meaning and love in myself, and meaning and love in the world. And oftentimes, to understand those complex ideas, we have to make a concerted effort to wrap our heads around bigger things, like the way the world works or what the colour of our skin means.” One thing El Roubi can’t seem to wrap her head around is that multidimensional Afro-Arab voices such as herself—she was born in Sudan to parents with Egyptian and Iranian roots and has since moved between the US, Europe and the Middle East—are still being filed under “women rappers” instead of “just artists”. That’s why it’s so important to her that artists in the region uplift and empower each other: “We are all we have,” she says. With this in mind, she throws the spotlight on two other voices from the diaspora—Palestinian-Canadian pop artist and activist Nemahsis, and Sudanese-American singer and actor Dua Saleh—as standout talents she would love to work with. But how does El Roubi manage to stay motivated, despite the challenges? “I want to be the best at what I do, and also I need money,” she admits with a healthy mix of ambition and pragmatism, which is why making a comfortable living from music is up there with her dream of having “devoted fans in every city in the world”. She has also found a way to turn the challenges she has faced into a source of inspiration: “‘Modest Heaux’ was inspired by a hateful comment by an Arab male troll, who said something rude about how I was ‘carrying myself’ and I should be ashamed for being a bad influence,” she says, adding: “It’s one of my favourite songs I’ve ever written.” Taking her cues from empowering artists such as Erykah Badu, Lauryn Hill and SZA, the rapper moulds her influences and background into stories that are unique to her. “I sit down and write, and whatever has been on my mind pours out of me,” she says of her creative process. “Sometimes it’s an easy process and sometimes it’s like a faucet that can’t be turned off but it’s just dripping, so everything comes out extremely slowly. But the well is never dry. It might take me years to finish a song, it might take a day, a week, 10 minutes.” Asked to describe herself in one word, El Roubi offers “iridescent”—a quality also reflected in her varied, shifting sound. Equally, she hopes her music shows her listeners that “they can be whoever and whatever they want to be, as long as they are good to themselves and others”. Because in El Roubi’s lexicon—beyond the socially conscious monologues and soothing R&B phrases—hip-hop is defined by uninhibited self-expression, and the search for freedom.