A few days before Hawas celebrated its 11th anniversary with a concert at El Sawy Culturewheel, I met the band’s vocalist, songwriter and co-founder Mahmoud Khateeb in Mohandessin. He was on his way back from a recording session for a new song.
Like many musicians of his generation, Khateeb has spent most of his adult life moving from rehearsal rooms, studios and concert halls to day jobs and back. He has performed on stage since 2008, co-founded more than one band, launched a solo project, composed for others and worked in music promotion and concert management. What makes his story particularly revealing is that it mirrors that of an entire generation of Egyptian independent musicians who came of age during the rise, decline and uncertain survival of the underground music scene.
When Hawas takes the stage at El Sawy Culturewheel, it will be a reminder that the band has managed to stay alive while dozens of similar groups disappear. For musicians like Khateeb, survival itself has become an achievement. The independent live music scene that flourished during the second half of the 2000s, peaking between 2011 and 2014, looks very different today. Many of the bands that once filled cultural centres, university stages and festivals have dissolved. Some members left music altogether and returned to careers in the professions they originally studied. Others continued as solo artists. Then came the Covid-19 pandemic, which dealt what many musicians describe as the final blow to a scene built around physical gatherings. Only a handful of bands managed to cross safely to the other side, including well established names such as Cairokee, Massar Egbari, Wust El Balad and Black Theama. Hawas was not one of the biggest bands, but it has endured.
That question of endurance surfaced even before our conversation began. A few days earlier, Khateeb had posted a question on Facebook.”Honestly, how do you see me 15 years from now? A respected artist? An artist from another era? A memory people speak about fondly? Someone who made some of the greatest songs in Egypt? Or someone who quit music and became the owner of a restaurant chain?” The post was humorous, but the joke hid an unmistakable anxiety. When I asked him about it, he smiled. “I think anxiety is one of the reasons I’ve survived this long,” he said. “I’m probably one of those most connected to younger musicians: rappers, producers and artists who are just starting out. Because of that I’m always aware of how fast things are changing.” Khateeb added, “When I say the younger generation, I hear how strange that sounds. A few years ago, I was the younger generation.” The remark captures something essential about Khateeb’s position in Egyptian music today. In his mid-thirties, he is no longer one of the newcomers who emerged during the underground boom. Yet neither does he belong to an older generation. He occupies a space in between, watching one musical era fade while trying to understand the next one.
Born and raised in Cairo, Khateeb’s relationship with music began early. Throughout his childhood and school years, music remained a constant presence. In 2009 he enrolled in the Faculty of Fine Arts, studying painting, and quickly immersed himself in the cultural life surrounding the university. In the faculty, he joined Atelier Theatre, where he acted, sang and composed music for productions. At the same time, he became one of the founders of Maghna Khan, a folk-influenced band that would become a notable name in the independent music scene of the period.
“Before Maghna Khan there were school projects and attempts with friends,” he recalls. “But they weren’t really bands. They never went beyond that small circle. The idea of having an actual music project with a name, an identity and a future started with Maghna Khan.” At the time, forming bands was almost a trend among young artists. The phenomenon itself was part of a larger cycle. Independent bands had flourished during the 1970s and early 1980s, before being overshadowed by major production companies that dominated the music market throughout the 1990s and early 2000s. When digital technologies and new cultural spaces emerged during the second half of the 2000s, a new generation of musicians once again began forming bands outside traditional industry structures. For a while, the model worked. Live music became the soundtrack of a generation. “Theatres, galleries, cultural centres , there were always events happening,” Khateeb says. “There were places where different art forms met each other. Music, theatre, visual arts. It felt like everything was connected.” He believes that period reflected a broader cultural moment. “The voice of Egypt at that time was live music,” he says. “There was movement. There was discussion. Even the topics of the songs – they weren’t about romantic love. The educated young person was seen as attractive. Lyrics had layers. There were meanings underneath the surface.”
By 2014, however, cracks had begun to appear. For Khateeb personally, that year marked a turning point. Internal disagreements within Maghna Khan eventually led to the band’s dissolution at what he describes as the height of its success.”We broke up in 2014,” he says. “Then some of us founded Hawas.” Rather than rushing into performances, the new group spent an entire year defining its artistic direction. “We wanted to understand what kind of music we wanted to make. We knew it needed to be different from the folk sound we had before. We wanted something that reflected where we were heading.” Today Hawas consists of eight members, an unusually large number for an independent band struggling to survive in a shrinking market. Yet that structure became one of its strengths. “The band includes people who write, compose, design graphics, handle sound engineering, music production and PR,” Khateeb explains. “That means we can do many things ourselves.”
The group’s headquarters remains remarkably modest. During our conversation, Khateeb pointed to a nearby rooftop apartment that belongs to Mahmoud Waly, Hawas’s bassist and producer. “That’s our lab,” he said. Inside a small room on that rooftop, band members gather to rehearse, experiment and record. “Sometimes we record tracks there. It’s our home studio.” Like many musicians who came of age during the underground boom, Khateeb watched the scene around him gradually shrink. For him, the decline did not happen overnight, nor does he believe it can be explained simply by the rise of rap music. “People often say rap replaced bands, but I don’t think it’s that simple,” he says. “Rap’s real explosion happened around 2018 and 2019. The changes in the live music scene had started years earlier.” Instead, he sees the transformation as the result of multiple factors unfolding simultaneously: changing audience tastes, fewer performance venues, economic pressures and the increasingly fragmented nature of attention itself.
“The biggest fear for independent musicians today is simple,” he says. “What if I keep working and none of it matters? What if all these years of effort disappear without anyone noticing?” The question haunts many artists working outside mainstream commercial structures. For Khateeb, the crisis goes far beyond live performances. “The audience doesn’t have the same amount of time anymore,” he continues. “Even musicians who already have an audience are struggling. How many people will leave Instagram Reels or TikTok and decide to spend four minutes listening to a new song on Spotify or Anghami? The attention span of the audience has become extremely fragmented. It’s not just live concerts that are facing difficulties. The entire alternative music scene is.”
Despite his concerns, however, Khateeb refuses to romanticise the past. The younger generation, he insists, continues to create new possibilities. When he speaks about emerging artists, he is not referring to a particular genre. “To me, the new generation means anyone between 16 and 20 who is trying to make something different,” he says. “It doesn’t matter whether it’s rap, electronic music or something else. What matters is experimentation. We were doing the same thing when we started in 2009.”
That openness has informed Hawas. Although the band remains rooted in live instrumentation, its sound has evolved significantly over the years. “Our identity is still based on instruments,” Khateeb explains. “We’re a band that can perform our songs live without relying on computers. The sound you hear at a concert is fundamentally the same sound we create in the studio.” At the same time, he acknowledges that newer songs contain a much stronger electronic element than before. The shift is partly the result of working with Mahmoud Waly, whose background in electronic production has increasingly shaped Hawas’s music. “The production side plays a much bigger role now,” says Khateeb. “And that’s important. If we stayed exactly the same, we’d only be speaking to people who listened to bands in 2011 and 2012.” Technology, he argues, is not the enemy of authenticity. “It helps us stay connected to what’s happening now. At least it helps us stay on the road.”
No event accelerated these changes more dramatically than Covid-19. For bands built around rehearsal, collaboration and physical presence, the pandemic created challenges that solo artists often did not face. “The turning point was Covid,” Khateeb says. “A band needs people to meet. You need rehearsals. You need studios. You need to experiment together. During Covid many bands simply couldn’t do that.” Meanwhile, solo artists working primarily with digital production continued releasing music at a rapid pace. “Some rappers were releasing a song every month,” he says. “Many bands couldn’t release anything.” For Hawas, survival required a conscious decision. The band had been preparing its first full-length album when the pandemic hit. Instead of abandoning the project, members adapted to the new circumstances. Songs were released gradually rather than as a traditional album launch.
More importantly, the band benefited from something many independent groups lacked. None of its members depended entirely on music for their livelihood. Like many musicians in Egypt’s independent scene, they had other careers, professions and responsibilities. Far from seeing this as a weakness, Khateeb believes it gave them freedom. “We’re not full-time musicians,” he says. “Everyone has their own work, family and life. But because of that we don’t have to make compromises. We have more freedom to choose what we want to do.” The band’s internal culture also played a crucial role. “Flexibility is probably the most important thing,” he says. “Everyone agreed that the band should continue.” He adds what may be the simplest explanation for Hawas’s survival: “We never stop releasing songs.” Year after year, regardless of circumstances, the band continues creating new work. “It would be easy to say we should have done more,” he reflects. “Maybe we could be in a better place today. But realistically, given all the circumstances, I don’t think we could have worked harder than we actually did.”
Despite the challenges facing live performance today, Khateeb believes audiences are beginning to rediscover their appetite for real human presence. He points to the gradual return of artists such as Yousra El Hawary to live stages, as well as the modest but noticeable increase in concerts by independent musicians. After years dominated by electronic production, digital consumption and now artificial intelligence, audiences seem increasingly drawn to experiences that cannot be replicated through screens. “People miss live music,” he says. “Artists miss it too.” Perhaps for that reason, he suggests, alternative music will soon take on new meaning. “In the future, maybe alternative art won’t mean alternative to mainstream music, but alternative to artificial intelligence.” The question brings us back to where our conversation began: what does the future hold for an independent musician? For Khateeb, the answer depends less on the industry than on the artist’s determination to keep going. “The biggest responsibility for survival, growth and success is on the artist,” he says.
Recently, he launched Artist Supports Artist, a non-profit Instagram initiative aimed at helping musicians connect, collaborate and support one another. Built on the belief that many artists who could work together simply do not know each other, the project seeks to strengthen ties within the music community. He hopes to expand it beyond social media. Looking back, he wishes more of the bands that disappeared had found ways to remain active, even in reduced forms. “I wish they hadn’t stopped,” he says. “Even if they had continued in a different way, even if it was smaller.” The scene, he believes, would look very different today.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 25 June, 2026 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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