Nayomi Reveals Softer Side in the Love Songs of R&B EP ‘xoxo’

Iraqi-born, Sweden-based artist, Nayomi, has spent the last few years dismantling the boxes the industry has tried to place her in. Whether hailed as an ‘Iraqi baddie’ for her rap bars or recognised for the vulnerability of her melodic R&B, Nayomi’s music has always been unapologetically true to herself.

The singer and rapper started 2025 with the February release of Aurah, a compilation that served as a bridge between her early underground roots and her increasing musical exploration. Featuring collaborations with the likes of Felukah, Perrie, and Dareen, Aurah remained firmly rooted in the rap sounds that first made her a standout in the Stockholm scene. However, as the year draws to a close, Nayomi has taken a slight reroute with xoxo, a new four-track EP that sees her dip into electronic-pop and R&B - and there’s even an acoustic number in there.

The EP opens with ‘Dmo3’ (Arabic for ‘tears’), a track that first saw the light of day in August and had a video drop a month later. Produced by frequent collaborator, MasioBeats, the song sits in the intersective overlap of a venn diagram that features the headings ‘electronic’, ‘pop’ and ‘two-step’. A seemingly chameleonic track that would fit in at a club as much as it does in the car or at home, the track is carried by Nayomi’s trademark trilingualism, smoothly switching between English, Arabic and Swedish, as she explores themes of heartbreak and self-discovery.

The album then moves into a liminal sound straddling the line of pop and R&B, with the lyrics of ‘24/7’ painting a more obsessive disposition of love. The track explores that oh so relatable feeling of being completely consumed by a crush, but fighting yourself to keep things low-key. Produced by Alex Rios, the track takes a step closer to R&B from the opener, using the kind of looped synths that define so much R&B production of the 2000s, layered against a driving, skittering mid-tempo pop beat. 

The EP takes another step closer to R&B with ‘Passenger Princess’, in which Nayomi fully submerges herself in the rich rhythms of pure R&B, with the track bearing the hallmarks of the kind of R&B that was dominating mainstream charts in the early 2000. 

While an acoustic version of ‘Dmo3’ closes the EP and offers another window into NNayomi’s versatility, the arc of the EP is in the first three tracks. It starts in a place of heartbreak in ‘Dmo3’ before shifting the anxiety of uncertainty in ‘24/7’, and closing on the indulgence of being a passenger princess and reveling in being loved - a perfectly neat and happy ending to the EP and Nayomi’s year.