There’s a specific type of cultural osmosis that happens when you spend enough time in a place that isn’t yours. You pick things up without trying. A melody sticks. A rhythm starts to feel familiar. That’s roughly the origin story of Beni Yakti, the new EP from Recife-born artist Krey Galin, which dropped in April 2026. Galin was in Egypt, eating at Turkish-owned restaurants, hearing Turkish music piped through television screens, absorbing it without any formal intent. He brought a Turkish collaborator into the studio, recorded the thing in the USA.
I’ve personally been to plenty of those Turkish-owned establishments in Egypt that inspired this song. They have their own playlists blasting all the time, and their music has a very distinct sound in the region. What Beni Yakti offers as an EP is a surprisingly authentic-sounding Turkish song, though it was recorded in the USA in 5 languages: Turkish, Japanese, Bengali, Korean, and English. The hook – “Yaktin!! baby Yaktin! baby Yaktin” – is the kind of phrase that gets stuck in your head before you’ve finished the song. It has that earworm quality that good pop music leans on, and the energy Galin brings to it carries the cross-cultural premise rather than just imitating it. As a listening experience, the Turkish melodic motifs are addictive to listen to, and listening to the same song from 5 different angles and also with some minor production variations in each version keeps it somewhat fresh.
What’s interesting about Beni Yakti is that it sits somewhere most EDM-adjacent pop doesn’t bother going. Turkish pop has its own established circuit, but it rarely bleeds into the broader global streaming conversation, and an artist from Brazil picking it up through an accidental experience in Egypt and then recording it multilingually in America is a genuinely unusual chain of events. Whether it all coheres is ultimately a question for the listener, but the premise at least earns some curiosity, and curiosity is a good place to start.