In February 2023, Amira Elfeky found the sound she’d been searching for all her life.
It had long been welling up inside of her, an unshakable feeling that the Los Angeles-based singer couldn’t articulate, nor even dared to. She often hesitated whenever her mouth came close to a microphone, lest she sing a note that strayed from the melody she felt but could not yet hear. For the first two decades of her life, she’d compiled a melting pot of sounds that came close to her inner melody: Deftones, Linkin Park, Evanescence. But it wasn’t until that winter night — when she haphazardly typed “Linkin Park Deftones type beat” into YouTube and clicked the first result — that she heard her soul-song sounded back to her. “I heard one second of it,” the 25-year-old says today, “and I was like, ‘Oh my God, oh my God!’”
Elfeky immediately called her producer, Tylor Bondar, and told him to meet her at the nearest recording studio. She jumped in the car, humming the melody she’d finally managed to externalize on the drive over. Bondar smoked a blunt and pressed record — and Elfeky instantly hit a register she’d never reached before. Bondar’s jaw was on the floor. The track flowed out of the singer like “a possession, like the song had always existed,” she recalls. “We just looked at each other and were like, ‘What the fuck?!’”
Then, lightning struck. Literally. As soon as they finished recording, a bolt took out all the power. When they turned the machines back on, they were relieved to find that the song had been saved just before the outage. They played it back and Elfeky immediately began to cry. “It was everything to me,” she says. “My soul finally felt like it was right; I made the song.” That song was called “Tonight” — a ghostly, sensuous track that is responsible for changing the course of Elfeky’s life.
After sitting on the demo for a few months, she eventually posted it, off-the-cuff, to TikTok in early July 2023. She turned her phone off, went to the movies with her boyfriend, and returned three hours later to 10,000 likes on her TikTok. Another three hours later it reached 80,000. She kept reposting the track, and soon gained one, two, three, four million likes. “Everything changed within a week,” she says. “Everything I’d ever wanted fell into place… and all just because I followed my intuition.”
Thanks to “Tonight,” Elfeky has become one of the fastest-rising stars of the nu-metal revival. She is one of the leaders of a new swathe of Gen Z kids who have turned to the Y2K genre and aesthetic to transmute their post-pandemic anguish. Elfeky’s take on it is gossamer, sensual, highly emotive; Deftones-esque. Earlier this year, she released her debut EP, Skin to Skin, on Anemoia — a subsidiary of Atlantic Records — and increased her rapidly growing fanbase on her first ever mini tour earlier this spring. With another EP, festival sets and a support slot on the Used’s upcoming tour in the works, Elfeky could well be on the way to becoming a generational voice.
Elfeky grew up in small-town Connecticut, with cows for neighbors and a strong, close-knit hardcore and emo scene just beyond the fields she called home. Her earliest daydreams of superstardom were stirred by one of the weirdest Y2K promotional gimmicks: a Britney Spears VHS tape sold exclusively at McDonald’s that included the “Oops!…I Did It Again” music video. She’d play it on repeat, throwing tantrums whenever her mom made her turn it off. As a toddler, Elfeky recalls watching live videos of Spears and fixating on the singer’s head-worn microphone. At six, she began begging her mom for a mic of her own. When she finally got one, she sang into it all day, pretending to be the popstar. Then, when she grew a little older, her focus shifted.
Her brothers, who were nearly a decade her senior, introduced her to the nu-metal of the 2000s that had soundtracked their adolescence. They began playing Guitar Hero together, and Elfeky replaced her plastic microphone with a plastic guitar. As a child, the music video for System of a Down’s “Chop Suey!” terrified her whenever it came on MTV. But when she played it alongside her brothers on the game, she finally got it. It invigorated her. (Earlier this year, she paid tribute to SOAD with a sultry cover of the Hypnotize classic “Lonely Day” for Spotify’s Singles series.)
She soon found herself gravitating towards Connecticut’s hardcore scene. Before Elfeky could even attend shows, she became enamored by the surrounding aesthetic. The first friend she made in high school was a dude who wore a Disturbed shirt; their clique soon expanded to include three more kids who had a penchant for Hot Topic merch. As teenagers, the five of them went to hardcore shows each weekend and Warped Tour every summer — and roasted s’mores in their backyards nearly every night while blasting Slipknot.
Elfeky felt desperate to form a band of her own, but she was still years away from capturing the elusive sounds in her head. She watched from the sidelines as others sang into their microphones, desperately wishing to project her own voice from the stage. “I always had this weird intention in my brain where it’s like, if I’m going to do it, I need to do it perfectly,” she says. So for a while, Elfeky didn’t sing at all.
During her late teens, Elfeky turned inwards. She sang — but only in isolation, and with a whisper. She began practicing in the bathroom, bringing in a guitar with her. She downloaded an app called BandLab and began recording simple vocals over a two-chord melody.
Elfeky’s first steps toward artistic extroversion happened when she was 18 and moved to San Francisco with her family. It was there that she met Bondar, the man who would soon be her producer and manager, at a skate park. After gaining the courage to play him one of her BandLab recordings, Bondar stopped in his tracks. He offered to record her for free. Through their sessions, Elfeky learned to turn pain into a punch. She honed in on her melodicism, her lyricism, and inched closer to the sound she was searching for.
Recurring themes emerged in her songs fairly quickly: codependent relationships; intense and unstable emotions. “I have BPD [borderline personality disorder],” she explains. “I have struggled with human beings my entire life. I’m overly sensitive, re-active, explosive. I have abandonment issues. I just feel very, very emotionally heightened.”
Naturally, nu-metal was the perfect soundtrack for indexing her anguish. So, when she eventually searched YouTube for that Linkin Park-meets-Deftones beat, everything clicked into place. It’s only recently that Elfeky has been able to gauge the in-person reaction to “Tonight.” Singing it live for a crowd during her first tour this spring, fans screamed the words back to her, tears in their eyes, hands stretched out to her.
“It’s quite remarkable that all the anxiety I have went out the window when I was onstage,” she says. “My only focus was on being with these people. I wanted to hold their hand. I wanted to sing to them. I wanted to meet them. I wanted to feel them. I wanted to touch them, to hug them. All of my anxiety was remedied by connecting with these people. I’m addicted to it now, I think.”