Tul8te · portrait
Dystinct is the name Iliass Mansouri gave himself when he decided he was going to make pop records in Moroccan Arabic and not explain it to anyone. He grew up in Antwerp, the son of Moroccan immigrants, navigating three languages before he was ten — Dutch at school, French in the city, darija at home. He built a sound that lives in all three at once and doesn't choose.
His breakthrough came in 2021 with "Mon Voyage," a record that mapped the emotional terrain of the diaspora — the feeling of being between two countries and fully at home in neither. A year later, "Ghazali" became Morocco's unofficial anthem for the 2022 FIFA World Cup, the sound of a nation watching itself go further than it had ever gone. That's not a small thing.