Malli

A song called longing

In Albanian, malli is the definite form of mall, a noun that Wiktionary translates as longing, missing or nostalgia. The Albanian dictionary Fjalë gives the example of longing for one’s homeland; the same word, with a different origin, can also mean goods or merchandise.

Before the EP came out, the news site Balkanweb reported on 3 July 2024 that fragments of an unreleased song by the pair, and video montages, were already circulating online under various titles; the report did not name the song. Limani joked about the leak on social media, and Dora shared his post with two emojis.

Vera me ty, a summer EP

Malli appeared on Vera me ty, “Summer with you”, an EP the two singers released on 11 July 2024 through the label Three60. As Top Channel’s music site described it, the EP holds five songs, each released with its own music video.

Top Channel reported a fortnight later that fans had voted four of the five songs, Malli among them, into its weekly Top List, with Ku je nis reaching second place and Diskoteka fifth. According to the Swiss chart record listed on Wikipedia, the EP itself reached number four in Switzerland, and Malli peaked at number 19 on the Swiss singles chart, well above the EP’s other charting songs.

Dhurata Dora

Dhurata Dora was born Dhurata Murturi in Nuremberg, Germany, in 1992, into an Albanian family, and began her career in Kosovo in 2011. In 2019 she released Zemër, a duet with the Algerian rapper Soolking that reached number one in Albania, charted in France, Belgium and Switzerland and was certified platinum in France.

Yll Limani

Yll Limani, born in Pristina in 1994, is a singer and songwriter whose father, Mufail Limani, was a member of the band Minatori, as the news site Lajmi.net also reported. Wikipedia lists several of his songs as Albanian number ones, among them Lshoja zanin, the title track of his first EP, released in December 2021.

He also writes for others: he is one of the ten credited writers of Ela, Cyprus’s entry at the Eurovision Song Contest 2022, sung by Andromache. In Emblem World, Malli sits in the Kosovo music collection, where people discover and rate local food, drink and music.