Culture & Arts
Elyanna carries Nazareth's Arabic from Coachella to the World Cup
Graphic: Times of Palestine
Original Reporting
On June 12 in Toronto, before Canada played Bosnia and Herzegovina, a singer from Nazareth stood on the field of the World Cup opening ceremony and sang in Arabic. Elyanna performed "Illuminate" alongside Canadian singer-songwriter Jessie Reyez at Toronto Stadium, and English Wikipedia's entry on the song notes she was the only artist on the FIFA World Cup 2026 soundtrack representing the Middle East and North Africa.
The track was released on 8 May 2026 through SALXCO UAM and Def Jam Recordings as the fourth single from the official album of the tournament, produced by Cirkut, and blends alternative R&B, global pop and Middle Eastern-inspired sound; FIFA described it as a celebration of cultural connection through music and sport.
Arab News reported in May that the 24-year-old was featured on one of the official songs, built around identity, unity and resilience.
Three years earlier the same voice had done something no one had done before it at the biggest festival in American pop.
Arab News reported that Elyanna became the first Palestinian artist to perform at Coachella and the first Arabic-language artist at the event, taking the Gobi Tent during the 2023 festival and becoming the first ever to perform an entire set in Arabic.
Coinciding with Arab-American Heritage Month, MILLE World noted, she performed on the Gobi stage during weekend one in Indio, California. Accounts differ on the day: Arab News placed the show on the Friday, while Remezcla reported it on Saturday, April 15.
The numbers around that weekend were unusual for an artist singing in no English at all.
Remezcla, citing Luminate, reported her self-titled debut EP had passed 7.2 million streams in the United States and her breakout single "Ana Lahale" more than 25 million globally, and that her US streaming numbers more than doubled in the week before Coachella.
Hespress described her then as a 21-year-old with nearly a million TikTok followers who shared a snippet of an unreleased mawwal, the sung poetry she folds into her live shows.
Afterwards, as the Arabic site Foochia recorded, she posted a line about hearing the mijwiz in the desert — Coachella, she wrote, had sung in Arabic.
The route to that stage began early and at home.
The Jerusalem Post reported that she was born Elian Amer Marjieh in Nazareth on January 22, 2002, that her maternal grandfather performed the Lebanese-Palestinian folk poetry known as zajal while her paternal grandmother was a Chilean pianist, and that she began singing at seven, drawing on Umm Kulthum, Sabah Fakhri, Beyoncé and Aretha Franklin.
The same account says that in 2017, at 15, she moved with her family to the United States, first to San Diego and then Los Angeles.
Remezcla reported that her mother is a writer, her Chilean grandmother a pianist, and that childhood Christmases in Viña del Mar filled her ear with reggaeton and with Julio Iglesias.
Growing up in Nazareth, Elyanna told Refinery29, she saw few people making a career out of art, so the idea felt almost impossible. Singing in Arabic professionally was itself a decision, and not an easy one.
In an Arabic interview with Savoir Flair she recalled leaving the studio in tears in the early sessions, convinced she could not sing in Arabic because she had never done it; Arabic, she said, is not something you can escape once it is inside you.
Arab America, citing her early work with the Grammy-winning producer Nasri Atweh, notes two EPs, Elyanna in 2020 and Elyanna II in 2022.
Rolling Stone, which had named her to its Future 25 list in 2023, reported her debut album Woledto — "I am born" — for April 12, 2024, and quoted her calling it a rebirth and "a journey through identity, love, rage, and feminism".
Arabic Wikipedia records the album as nine tracks released through Universal Arabic Music, with launch shows at the Wiltern in Los Angeles on April 27 and at KOKO in London on May 6.
Then the war.
The National reported that the keffiyeh featured prominently in her Coachella set and that her 2023 track Ghosn Zeytoun, or Olive Branch, is seen as one of the first songs to speak of Palestine's anguish since the war began; performed at the opening of Egypt's El-Gouna Film Festival, its stark Arabic ballad moved the audience to tears.
She has said the song was written quickly, as a form of family therapy.
On June 9, 2024, Refinery29 reported, she sang Olive Branch on the Governors Ball main stage in Queens with graphics behind her reading "All Eyes on Rafah" while the crowd held Palestinian flags. "I will always speak for my people," she told the magazine.
She spoke, too, of praying daily for people being hurt and of waiting to visit home again. Her television debut on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert made her the first artist to sing in Arabic on the programme, the same interview noted.
TRT World reported in February 2024 that she had embarked on a sold-out North American tour, playing to a full house in Washington on February 9. The stages kept widening.
She joined Coldplay in 2024 on the single We Pray with Little Simz, from the album Moon Music; Arab News reported her performing it with the band and Argentine singer Tini on NBC's Today in October 2024, and her own Arabic-language version released on September 20.
Interview magazine reported in September 2025 that she had spent the summer opening for Coldplay in stadiums on the Music of the Spheres tour and had become the first Arab artist to play Wembley. The tour grossed more than $1.3 billion, according to The National, the highest-earning by a rock band.
"I am a Palestinian artist, and I was born and raised in Nazareth," she told Interview. To Billboard Arabia, quoted in Billboard's World Cup series in June, she put it more simply: "I carry my roots wherever I go."
What comes after Toronto has not been announced. Her last widely reported homeland-adjacent booking was the closing night of the Doha Film Festival on November 28, 2025, a special show with the Qatari singer Dana Al Meer.
The Nazareth-area site Bokra headlined her World Cup appearance as a journey from Yafa al-Nasra to a global stage — the shortest description yet of a career built on singing in a language most of the audience does not speak, and being understood anyway.
