From Refugee to Global Pop Sensation: SHAB Reflects on Her Journey as New Single 'Perfume' Approaches

SHAB

Ahead of World Refugee Day, the global pop artist looks back on fleeing Iran as a teenager with a single suitcase, and the freedom that followed

DALLAS, TX, UNITED STATES, June 20, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ -- This World Refugee Day, global pop sensation SHAB is reflecting on the journey that shaped her, one that began not on a stage, but on a flight out of Iran as a teenager, carrying everything she owned in a single suitcase.

World Refugee Day, marked each year on June 20th, exists to recognise the strength and resilience of people forced to leave their homes behind. For SHAB, that recognition isn't abstract. She escaped radical fundamentalism in Iran as a teenager, arriving alone in New York speaking only Farsi and German, with no one waiting for her and no idea what would come next.

What came next was a complete rebuilding. Learning English while working multiple jobs through secondary school and university. She briefly attended law school before walking away to follow the one creative discipline that made her feel fully alive: music. That journey shaped her debut album 'Infinite Love' and her sophomore double album 'One Suitcase', titles drawn directly from her own story. It also shaped the woman she is today: a vocal advocate for women's rights in Iran, speaking openly against what she has called the "gangster regime" in Tehran.

It's a story she returns to not because it defines her, but because she's clear about what it cost and what it made possible. The artist now commanding festival stages and climbing the Billboard charts could not have existed inside the Iran she left behind. That reflection arrives alongside genuine momentum. SHAB's new single 'Perfume' lands June 26th; a sleek, magnetic, and entirely her own. Underpinned by a driving beat and laced with the fast, shimmering Persian string work that has become a quietly distinctive strand of her sound, 'Perfume' is both propulsive and hypnotic, with a vocal performance that navigates heat and playfulness, control and abandon.

Lyrically, the track revels in confident, sensuous power, with SHAB moving through it like someone who knows exactly the effect she has: "I wanna shine like a new Ferrari; I get you high on my perfume."

'Perfume' follows an extraordinary run for SHAB. Her recent collaboration with Preston Harris, 'It's On You', surged to No. 15 on the Billboard Dance/Mix Show Airplay chart, her fourth Billboard Top 40 charting single, placing her alongside Bruno Mars, RAYE, and PinkPantheress among 2026's most talked-about pop forces. That track followed a Top 40 Rhythmic and Pop chart breakthrough with Fat Joe on 'VooDoo' (the most Shazamed song on Apple Music in the weeks after release) and consecutive Billboard Dance chart entries with 'Lipstick' and 'Skin & Bones'.

For SHAB, that resonance has never been separate from where she started. Every chart entry, every sold-out night, every new single is, in its own way, a continuation of that first flight out of Iran with one suitcase, proof of a freedom she once had to leave everything behind to find. This World Refugee Day, her story stands as a reminder of what's possible on the other side of displacement.

This year's World Refugee Day, marked under the theme "Until Everyone Is Safe," falls on the 75th anniversary of the 1951 Refugee Convention, the founding document of international protection for people forced to flee their homes. According to UNHCR's most recent Global Trends report, 41.6 million people were refugees worldwide at the end of 2025, part of a wider population of well over 100 million forcibly displaced people globally, around one in every 70 people on Earth. For the first time in a decade, that number fell year-on-year, largely due to refugees returning to countries including Afghanistan, Syria, and Sudan, a reminder that displacement is not always permanent, even when its effects last a lifetime.

Stories like SHAB's are, in that sense, one version of a much larger picture: of people who leave with almost nothing and go on to rebuild, often far from where they started.

Patrick Welsh
Rising Notes
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