ZULI Revives His Swag Lee Alias with Second Volume of ‘Habibi Loops’

Five years after the first ‘Habibi Loops’, Egyptian producer ZULI brings back his mischievous alter ego, Swag Lee. With the long-awaited second dive into the Habibi Loops universe, ‘Habibi Loops Vol.2’ sits somewhere between a beat tape, sonic collage and cultural satire.

This time, Swag Lee sharpens his sound design approach without losing the unruly spirit that made the original tape so distinctive and ahead of its time. Built entirely from degraded MP3 rips of Egyptian funk, pop and hip-hop classics, the 12-track record stitches together rough cuts, jagged edits, and looping fragments of the samples in a way that hovers between groove and disarray. Swag Lee isolates micro-moments of percussion and breathy vocals to create a looping, glitchy sonic collage that feels like it’s constantly on the verge of falling apart, yet never actually does.

Threaded through this chaos are short comic interludes, sourced from Arabic Instagram reels, Facebook detritus, and snippets of everyday Egyptian internet humor, that interrupt and reframe the music mid-flow. These unpredictable satirical elements give the record its crooked charm, playfully reflecting on how Egyptian pop culture circulates and mutates in the algorithm online. Mixed together, it feels like a forward-thinking sonic homage to Egyptian culture filtered through ZULI’s unmistakable experimental reflexes.

While ‘Habibi Loops Vol.2’ leaned more into abstraction, this new chapter is more about chasing a consistent groove. The record extends ZULI’s long-running fascination with the loop as a site of tension, humor and repetition, a space where the familiar sounds we grew up with are turned inside out. In short, Swag Lee is back, and he’s having way too much fun dissecting the sound of Egypt’s collective archive.