Something strange happened while Salvador Navarrete (AKA Sega Bodega) and Mayah Alkhateri – partners both in life and in music – were making Kiss Facility’s debut album, Khazna. Galway-born Navarrete doesn’t speak a word of Arabic, but when he heard UAE-raised Alkhateri’s lyrics for dreamy techno cut “Kotshena”, he immediately began describing the exact image she was singing about. “It was honestly scary,” Alkhateri tells Dazed, laughing in disbelief. Navarrete, however, found a deeper meaning in the interaction: “Sometimes you don’t even need to be heard to be understood. That’s why music is so powerful. Once it’s done and you hand it over to people, they understand what you’re saying – even when they don’t know they understand.”

It’s a phenomenon that I’ve experienced myself while interviewing artists from around the world, giving rise to an irrational (though not necessarily untrue) belief that when an emotion is pure, it can transcend language. And, in our interview at least, Kiss Facility certainly seemed underpinned by pure emotions. Alkhateri and Navarrete first connected when Alkhateri shared a Sega Bodega release on her Instagram story, and, after a year-long talking stage, they eventually met up for a drink in London. “It was a brief interaction but, the moment I met her, I was like, ‘How do I [see her again]?’,” recalls Navarrete. “I was leaving the next day to do some shows, and I just booked her on the next flight out. It was meant to be, honestly.”

It was only after they were cemented as a couple that Mayah confessed her aspirations of making music. “I wanted to make music before then, but every time I met someone to make music, they wanted to take it to a sexual level, [so] I grew out of wanting it,” she explains. “Then, it just clicked with Salv. I told him I had heard lots of shoegaze music and always wanted to have that in the Arabic language. Then, literally the day before we released ‘Blackstone’, an Iraqi artist called Nabeel released his shoegaze song. There was definitely something in the air of Arabic artists finally entering that style.”

Indeed, more widely, much has been written about the resurgence of shoegaze sonics among Gen Z listeners. Dubbing the trend ‘zoomergaze’, critics have observed a hauntological link between the fuzzy walls of sound that defined acts like Slowdive and the Cocteau Twins in the 90s, and today’s post-Covid youth. Having grown up in an age defined by superficial online connections and diminishing prospects for the future, they suggest that young people are finding solace not only in shoegaze’s melancholic sonics themselves, but also in returning to a time when life seemed to be less stressful – quite literally forming zoomers’ rose-tinted gaze at a time gone by.

While Navarrete was keen to distance himself from the label on Kiss Facility’s debut album (“There’s only like two shoegaze tracks on there – we’ve just been put in that box”), it does seem to mark something of a parallel future for the genre. Where shoegaze’s recent revival in acts like Wisp and Jane Remover finds a quicker and more hot-headed union with hyperpop, Kiss Facility draws on the decidedly (c)older references of trip-hop, techno and dream-pop (the duo’s first album even included a feature from ‘dream pop future seer’ POiSON GiRL FRiEND herself). Rather than evoking overpopulated online spaces, Khazna’s reverb-drenched soundscapes create space, casting Navarrete and Alkhateri as lovers at the end of the world, yearning for connection over a seemingly infinite distance. It’s less of a comforting wall of sound than an empty warehouse, and more of a thousand-yard stare than a shoe-gaze.

Below, Alkhateri and Navarrete further unpack the themes and experiences that underpin their debut album, Khazna, including a playlist of songs that inspired the project.

The playlist you shared is mostly English-language music. Would you say that’s where most of your inspiration came from?

Alkhateri: Definitely. I’m not gonna sit here and say, ‘Oh, we got inspiration from Arabic music’. No, I got inspiration from my own vocals. There are Arabic songs I grew up with that shaped the melodies I’m making, but I don’t have any specific song for it, it’s just in my memory. I’ve always loved music from different languages – Persian music has rich writing and melody, Balkan culture has crazy songs, I also love Turkish music. 

On the vocal side, I would say Enya [was a big influence], in terms of doing vocals with gibberish lyrics and creating your own language. When I first heard her, I was like, ‘What is she saying?’ Now, I get it, because people generally don’t like listening to lyrics they don’t understand, but people are now increasingly aware that music is actually just about how you feel. I just want the songs to make me feel something. 

How does that connect to your process, Salv, given that you don’t understand the lyrics? 

Navarrete: I think that applies to when you can understand the lyrics, too. Feelings can often be lost in phonetics. A lot of times I work with singers, they’ll do a take and it’s got the feeling in it. Then they go, ‘Well, I don’t know, I feel like I’m not saying the words right, let me do it again’. They’ll lose all the feeling because they want the lyrics to be crystal clear. The melody already decides what it wants to say; it knows what it wants to be. Sometimes you have to sacrifice the words for it.

Alkhateri: Oh, it’s similar to that artist you always tell me about, Salv!

Navarrete: Yeah, Max Martin did this with the Backstreet Boys. There was a version of ‘I Want It That Way’ that was grammatically correct, but the final version isn’t. It doesn’t make sense. There was a version that existed before it, and it’s still online, where the sentences are in correct English, but there’s something wrong with it. [Max Martin] switched the words to make less sense, but they just fit. 

“The melody already decides what it wants to say; it knows what it wants to be. Sometimes you have to sacrifice the words for it“

But Khazna does have some meaning, right? It means ‘hidden treasure’ in Arabic?

Alkhateri: Yes, ‘khazna’ means a safe or hidden treasure. That was the meaning of this album – it has hidden meanings. There are some lyrics that I actually quoted from Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish. I took inspiration from his poem ‘A State of Siege’ – it’s about a mother who lost her child, and I rewrote it in terms of wanting to make it feel more hopeful, like in a healing way. I wrote it as a dialogue, two souls talking to each other, fantasising about what they want to be in the afterlife – if they want to be a stone or a tree or a raindrop that feeds the bird. It feels like a lullaby of some sort. That song is ‘Noon’.

Khazna is also about sexual desires and how, in my culture, we don’t really talk about it with our family or our friends. It’s just between me and myself, and there’s always some sort of wall there. I felt that [Kiss Facility] should be a safe space to talk about anything. ‘Kotshena’ is about having a double life and identity crisis, trying to pretend that everything is fine. Yeah… it will take a long time to explain the lyrics, but each has its own story, which is why we named it Khazna.

This is a random one, but at the end of ‘Qamar 14’, is that your cat? Did you record a lot at home?

Navarrete: Yes, that was our friend’s cat, Bug. She was doing her vocals! She’s our friend's, but she stayed with us for a year, so we technically raised her right here. 

I was less expecting to see Kraftwerk on your list of references… 

Navarrete: Yeah, I’ve loved them since I was a kid. There’s a real rawness to it that I wish I could do, but they’re just using different machines than I am. I like how in the machine they felt. They’re not trying to sound like humans.

‘Kotshena’ was inspired by Kraftwerk. ‘How Soon is Now?’ inspired the last song on the album, ‘baglaens’ low-key inspired ‘Absent from My Eyes’ – that’s an amazing song. ‘Plasma’ has elements of POiSON GiRL FRiEND. We’ve shared songs that were referenced as a kind of sonic world on the project.  

Do you have an artist that you associate with your relationship together? 

Navarrete: We didn’t discover her together, but I associate POiSON GiRL FRiEND with meeting Maya – definitely Melting Moment.

Alkhateri: It was kind of our love song. My favourite track on our last EP was the POiSON GiRL FRiEND one. I honestly had no idea how to find her, she doesn’t have much presence online. Salv wrote on Twitter, ‘Find me POiSON GiRL FRiEND’. From there, we met her in Japan and she’s really amazing. 

Khazna is out now.