7me7

7me7 is a rock band from Ferizaj, formed shortly after the end of the war in June 1999 by Urim Veselaj, Betim Bekteshi, Adnan Hyseni and Zgjim Veselaj, with Bekteshi as the singer. Wikipedia counts 7me7 among the best-known bands to emerge in Kosovo after 1999.

The members started out playing covers of The Doors, Pearl Jam and the Red Hot Chili Peppers in local bars, on town squares and in youth centres. The name came from a barber: around the end of 2000 Bekteshi told him the band could only rehearse after twelve-hour working days, and the barber suggested "12 to 12, or 7 to 7". Their own songs looked at the political and social life of post-war Kosovo; "Eksperimental", recorded in 2004, became one of the best known, beside "Nëse", "Qielli", "Flutura", "Vagoni", "Keq" and "I Lost It", whose video shows children playing football.

The band played in Skopje in 2007 and at the Hard Rock Café in Pristina in 2009, but emigration scattered it. Hyseni left around 2003 to work at US military camps; his replacement on guitar, Ilir Bekteshi, moved to Sweden in 2009; and when Betim Bekteshi went to work in Afghanistan for five years in 2010, 7me7 stopped. Urim Veselaj was the only one who stayed in Kosovo. "I believe we are still an experiment," he told Kosovo 2.0 in 2019.

That interview ended with the hope of releasing the band's archive and new material, and it came true: in 2023 7me7 published Eksperimental, with "Ferizaj", "Mirëdita", "Qielli" and "Keq", then the new album Gjysmë in two parts, Ana 1 (2023) and Ana 2 (2024), and a live session of their songs, Ana e butë.