Nooriyah is the DJ Mag Top 100 DJs 2024 Future Star winner

While most DJs might agonise over how to open their debut Boiler Room set, Nooriyah decided to give those first moments to her father, who sat beside her playing the oud, a lute-type stringed instrument. Her beats caress the gravitas of his playing before growing into the point of focus — a little diorama of her musical identity, and perhaps the most iconic opening to any Boiler Room set in the past four years.

“I was thinking about what was important to me, about my music journey,” she shares about the seminal viral moment that’s established her as one of the most electrifying new voices in DJing. “Because the songs selected really represented all the places I lived or had a musical impression on me, it was only right to include my dad. He’s such a big musical influence — we would drive in the car and he would listen to everything from Luther Vandross to Talal Maddah.”

This moment is truly just the beginning — the next four minutes surge through an expertly layered pastiche of ’90s hip-hop and traditional South West Asian and North African (SWANA) music, revealing the fearless innovation of Nooriyah’s craft. To call her simply a DJ is doing a disservice — she is equal parts educator and archivist, lighting up when DJ Mag refers to her as the latter. “That’s very much something I resonate with. It’s as if I packed a collection of imaginary records in every carry-on bag I had going into the countries I’ve lived in.”

Nooriyah’s near-encyclopaedic knowledge of SWANA music history and its influences on the West make her raucously eclectic sets more than dancefloor fuel — they’re discourse in action. Who else thinks to trace the influence of Arabic scales in Western music by splicing Timbaland with dabke and mahraganat? “I like making those connections,” she beams, explaining how she’s quietly dismantling our idea of music theory away from the Western standard. Born in Saudi Arabia, grown in Japan, and living in the UK for over a decade, Nooriyah overlaps artefacts from each of her homelands like lines on a map, leading somewhere undiscovered yet stunningly familiar. “Which is sort of the diasporic feeling,” she says. “Being from everywhere but nowhere all at once.”