DISPLACED HEART: WHEN A LONDON PRODUCER MET A PALESTINIAN POET

“It’s so important for artists to collaborate, create purposeful art, fight for justice, and unite the world; music and poetry are perfect for that.”- Moe Moussa

In a world saturated with polished production and distant commentary, Displaced Heart arrives as something raw, radically human and urgently necessary. Built from the most intimate tools, voice notes, a phone mic, instinct, this collaboration between British musician and producer Poppy H and Palestinian poet Moe Moussa doesn’t just resist the machinery of war and silence. It listens. It mourns. It defies.

Due for release via Fort Evil Fruit in July 2025, Displaced Heart is a sonic reckoning stretching from Rafah to London, carried by Moe’s searing, impassioned spoken word and anchored by Poppy’s intense beats, skittering instrumentals, and haunted textures. What began as lo-fi journaling in the wake of personal grief and genocide soon grew into an act of radical solidarity created entirely with a phone, no mics, no laptops, no production polish just urgency and trust.

Through class consciousness, creative honesty, and a refusal to let Palestinian voices be sidelined, the album becomes something far beyond commentary. As Moe vocalises his lived experience of Israel’s assault on Gaza raw and unfiltered Poppy constructs a sound world around it that amplifies rather than smooths over. This is not a feature. It’s a collaboration built on equal footing, stitched together by mutual purpose and defiant care.

As we sat down to talk about Displaced Heart, what emerged wasn’t just an interview. It was an exploration of what it means to hold space, to share it, and to create in a time when creation itself feels like resistance.

Your earlier works like Grave Era (Cruel Nature, February 2024) were recorded entirely in solitude using your phone. How did that approach shape the emotional tone of Grave Era and the work that followed?

All of my work has been made using my phone as microphone and mixing desk. Everything I record goes straight into the in-built mic no external mics, no laptops, nothing sophisticated. I had this feeling I would move on from it, but I don’t want to overcomplicate the process. The technique was kind of perfect for Grave Era there are loads of field recordings on that record. I’d be wandering around London openly recording on my phone to document the bubble the city became as the genocide began in late 2023.

You’ve described your method as grounded in a working-class ethic, unfussy, no-frills. How does that ethos feed into the message behind your music?

I’ve got a real hang-up about class, I think maybe I protest too much. But I do believe certain things in life are kept out of reach of the working class, or we’re led to believe early on that unless we spend shitloads on the best gear, we’re not doing it properly. That can be the end of the road for people who can’t afford it. I’m lucky I’m not broke, nor am I tight but the instant, shoestring nature of how I make music speaks to my upbringing. I had a great childhood, really, but we’d have versions of what other kids had. I think my music is a version of what proper producers and musicians are doing. The lo-fi, unfussy production probably mirrors the messages themselves but that’s not up to me to decide.

How did grief and personal change affect the direction of Treadwater Fury? Did it shift how you listened to the world around you?

Yeah, Treadwater was a dark time. I buried myself in sessions that produced some real mad sounds, some of which haunt the new album. I found myself subconsciously learning how other artists expressed grief. But it was also a big period of discovery in terms of films. I was bingeing international films and loads of Italian stuff at a rate of knots. These wonderfully emotional performances were at odds with the way I deal with grief or expression in public. All set to beautiful soundtracks. So TF was inspired just as much by scenes from Italian films as it was by the world around me. Basic escapism, maybe.

You reached out to Moe Moussa expecting silence but instead found resonance. What was it like hearing his voice for the first time within your compositions?

I can’t say for definite, but some of the tracks I was producing were calling out for vocals, and I didn’t want to do them myself. Collaboration has always interested me, but I’ve never really tried to make it happen before. Maybe I found a bit of confidence somewhere. Moe didn’t hear a note of music before sending me his voice note recordings. I didn’t want to guide his hand at all, tonally or rhythmically, so it was an experiment. My only guidance was: say exactly what you want to say in exactly the way you want to say it. I was taken aback when his voice notes came through, some were mega short, with all sorts of sound quality. So the challenge was set. Moe has a great spoken word voice, so I knew I could work with it, but I also didn’t want to just lay them down as flat spoken word pieces. This is a music album, and I wanted to do right by them with compositions that matched the natural and very real drama of the words. Things started to click. I was racing toward what you hear today. That’s a testament to Moe’s poetry and honesty.

Was there a particular poem or line from Moe that unlocked something musically for you?

Yes. It’s this passage, repeated two or three times throughout the album that gives Displaced Heart its title:

To my slain moods

To my lost family

To this thin, featureless body

To this displaced heart

To what was

To what will be

To what should this sorrow belong?

To whom should this sorrow belong?

It broke my heart.

How did collaborating with someone experiencing Gaza’s horror in real time change how you understood your role as a producer and ally?

I still don’t know. Moe told me he loved the experience, but I still don’t know if I’ve done right by him or if my role even matters in Moe’s input. I’m proud and privileged to have collaborated with him. I’m pleased with what we’ve created.

This project doesn’t just amplify it listens. What did you learn about listening through this process?

It sharpened my senses. Chatting with Moe on the phone was a huge wake-up call. Here is a man whose world has been torn apart like thousands of Palestinians, and he’s still listening better, harder. That became the thing: listen better. People talk about being desensitised to atrocities like the genocide in Gaza. I think that’s another way of saying I’ve stopped caring. Hearing Moe’s words was a reminder that one should not be needed, that the people being murdered by Israel love and are loved. They are us.

You’ve said this project took both of you out of your comfort zones, but Moe was risking far more. How did that responsibility influence your decisions throughout the process?

It’s a big deal. I hope I did a decent job expressing an outside-looking-in experience alongside Moe’s firsthand accounts. I felt it was important to be present, to play a part in it out of solidarity. Moe was very trusting toward my role. From the moment his voice notes came through, they began to drive the whole thing. I just had to build a world around them. That became my responsibility.

What does artistic solidarity mean to you now, after creating Displaced Heart?

One of the reasons I contacted Moe was because of the lack of Palestinian voices. We’d hear Thom Yorke whining on “but, but, but”, and lots about Kneecap who are on the right side but where are voices like Moe’s? Where are the projects that don’t paint Palestinians merely as victims? Where are the artists in all this? Having Palestinian artist Sohail Salem provide the cover art was another shout from the rooftops: let them be seen and heard. Fuck Keir Starmer and all the other arseholes feeding the genocide. Let Palestinians be heard.

Has this collaboration changed how you see your own community, musically or politically?

The jury’s still out. Ask me in a couple of weeks, I’ll probably say I’m not hugely impressed with the indifference I’m seeing. We’ll see.

What do you hope listeners sit with after hearing the album?

Moe is a poet. A real person. Loved and loving. There are millions like him. This is his album.

Displaced Heart is more than an album it’s an act of resistance, a document of lived truth, and a bridge forged in grief, trust, and uncompromising honesty. As Moe Moussa’s searing words carry the weight of a people under siege, Poppy H builds sonic scaffolding that holds space without overshadowing. In a time where silence equals complicity, this collaboration dares to speak, to feel, and to fight back through art. It reminds us that solidarity is not abstract it’s collaborative, vulnerable, and loud enough to break through the noise.

Continuining to stand in solidarity with Palestine, Irish label Fort Evil Fruit are releasing the record in digital and tape versions with a percentage of any sales being donated to Palestinian charities