Nemahsis Performs and Wins Big at This Year’s JUNO Awards

This Sunday, Nemahsis made her JUNO Awards debut with her song “Stick of Gum.” She also won two awards for Best Alternative Album of the Year for Verbathim and Breakthrough Artist of the Year.

In 2021, Nemahsis went viral on TikTok for her single “what if i took it off for you?” The next year, she would release her debut EP eleven achers, leading to many opportunities opening up for her. The EP included songs such as “i’m not gonna kill you,” which explored her personal feelings and experiences with Islamophobia.

However, after beginning to plan for her debut album, Verbathim, and just having been signed to a label, she was dropped that same month. On October 7, 2023, Hamas surprised Israel with an attack, and Israel then declared a “full siege” on Gaza, cutting off essentials like water from Palestinian civilians in the strip. The Palestinian-Canadian singer posted on social media about the siege and the cutting off of essentials, and was soon dropped from her label.

Nemahsis continued working on her album, even filming the music video for her song “Stick of Gum” in Jericho. She released her debut, Verbathim, in 2024 and received critical acclaim.

In an interview with Q with Tom Power, she shared the comments she’ll hear about possibly being more successful if she didn’t wear a hijab, and how these comments used to make her insecure about it.

She stated, “But now I see it as like—I know that this could be the best song if it wasn’t mine, but I still want to find a way to make it. So now I take it like I’m competing with myself, like, a version of me if she wasn’t a hijabi, if she wasn’t Palestinian, if she wasn’t brown. I’m competing with that version if she would execute the same things.”

After all that work and competing, Nemahsis performed at the JUNO Awards, Canada’s biggest music awards event, performing her song “Stick of Gum and winning her first Juno for Best Alternative Album of the Year.

Later in the night, DijahSB and Klô Pelgag announced Nemahsis as the JUNO Breakthrough Artist of the Year.

In her acceptance speech, Nemahsis stated, “This is dedicated to all the hijabis that are. I’ve been wearing [a] hijab for twenty-plus years, and all I ever wanted was to turn on [the] family channel, YTV, and just see somebody that looks like me. I didn’t think it would take this long, and I didn’t think I would be the one to do it, but I’m happy it got to this as a fully independent Palestinian-Canadian Muslim woman. I would like to thank God, Allah subhanahu wa ta’ala, thank you so much.”

Referencing her journey after her label dropped her, she continued, “I would like to thank my mom, my dad for standing by me when I was dropped. They said, ‘Don’t worry, you have a whole house that loves you; no matter what is said about you, no matter what the public has misconstrued, we will always stand by you.'”

You can check out Nemahsis’ JUNO Awards performance below.