Ameretat’s self titled debut album, released 2025, opens with ‘Ghazal-e-ātish / Posht-e-pardeh’ (‘Ode to the Fire / Behind the Veil’).
The track starts with a medium paced but purposeful drum beat before a slice of feedback introduces a distinctly Iranian sounding guitar. Male vocals then join the ever melodic mix: not exactly sung and certainly not spoken word, there’s something poetic in the delivery that along with the overall tone and phenomenal production makes it deeply alluring, as though rising from an ancient temple buried in the depths of Earth, the sound emerging through wisps of smoke from this sacred place’s terra firma entrance.
More instruments of Iranic heritage join as the song entwines within its many layers, constantly building and gaining momentum without ever increasing pace. Then from the temple there volcanically erupts a deity of old; slowly roused from its centuries of sleep by injustice after injustice, it suddenly emerges on the surface in the guise of female vocals that bristle with godly energy, passion and purpose.
Indeed, from WikiP:
“Ameretat is the Avestan language name of the Zoroastrian divinity/divine concept of immortality. Amerdad is the Amesha Spenta of long life on earth and perpetuality in the hereafter.”
The sense of an underground lair from which a great force has erupted came instantly during the first listen, not a clue about the Ameretat’s meaning. I can’t hear it any other way than the band fully intending this; and they’ve achieved it with absolute precision and finesse.
In a world where social media is king information on Ameretat is thin on the ground; the album being released through the LA VIDA ES UN MUS DISCOS label and there apparently being no social media accounts for the band (with any of the big players that I could find, at least). Yet a lot of the right people seem to have become aware of its absolutely incredible sound, Ameretat having played both Roadburn and Supersonic festivals; the websites of both being the source of any available information, which pretty much amounts to the band being “formed in Barcelona, Spain by S and K – children of the Iranian diaspora with family on both sides of an autocratic divide.”
The music is described as drawing “directly from the folk traditions of the Lor people of Western Iran, from whom one member traces their heritage. Songs pull from musical and literary influences across the Iranic world, blending modern and traditional folk instrumentation with elements of crust and hardcore punk, and multitonal feedback reminiscent of the region’s ancient drone traditions.”
My knowledge of music from the region goes no further than Googoosh, Kourosh Yaghmaei, Faramarz Aslani, Omar Khorshid, plus the couple of compilation CDs that led me to their discovery in the first place. Their respective sounds are found described as Persian with varied add-ons, i.e. Persian psychedelic rock, Persian folk, Persian pop, etc.
I would’ve easily gone with the term here too, but for what appeared a very purposeful attempt to avoid it—Iranian or even better Iranic used instead—in the small amount said about Ameretat.
Delving into both the term and Iranic music per se, it turned out the difference is more than worthy of distinction.
Persia isn’t an earlier term for Iran; instead, it’s an area contained within it. Ameretat are fully inclusive of the entire area, singing in “Persian, Avestan, Lori, Kurdish, and English as they cover topics diverse as war, power, love, despair, kindness, and our shared humanity.”
That English makes the mix is wholly relevant to the political aspect of Ameretat’s message given Britain’s more than dubious activity in the area; the opening track on the subject of Iranic oil and how most of it ended up in British hands thanks in no small part to Winston Churchill (a video for the track, in which the story is told appears on bandcamp; though as mysteriously as many other aspects of Ameretat, only in part).
Iranic music is primarily formed by two styles of composition: dastgāh and the one that preceded it, maqam. To my ear both are at work here, dastgāh certainly; going and listening to examples of both in the most original form available revealed that if anything all the Persian-style names mentioned above took the dastgāh style and softened it, whereas Ameretat has captured the authentic darkly seductive and equally threatening edge that somehow hugs the tone of the music like honey longing for a fig and taken it to where its essence demand it be given the current state of the world address.
The result is breathtaking, beyond exhilarating, an unstoppable force born of dawn-of-time elements: solid as the Earth’s hardest minerals; moving with determined purpose like the strongest wind; forged with a ferocious passion hot as the first ever fire; free as the air to be everywhere.
Ameretat has created something so monumental it sounds as though this is what Iranic music was destined to become for the gods ordained it to be so. The sound is utterly heavenly; a more than apt description given Garōdmān, the name of heaven in the Zoroastrian faith, translates to House of Song.
And this is to talk of just one track from an album of eight, where each is just as energetic and compelling as the last!
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Thanks for reading 🙂