In 2024, Elaha Soroor and members of Kefaya performed at a celebration of Hazara culture in Vienna, where posters advertising the event were torn from walls across the city, in what read as an attempt to silence it. The Hazara are a mostly Shia minority who have endured more than a century of persecution in Afghanistan, much of the community scattered into exile, which is why celebrating that culture abroad can still draw hostility. “A Bright Gaze – Negahe Roshan” came out of what followed: the solidarity and unexpected friendships that gathered around the musicians. It is the one bright stretch on Our Freedoms Must Be Won – Azadi Kho Bigri, an album otherwise built on exile and displacement, out this July on the band’s own label, Radio International.

Soroor grew up between Iran and Afghanistan and rose to national attention as a finalist on the television contest Afghan Star, the first female Hazara singer to perform on Afghan television. After she used her platform to condemn the stoning law, death threats forced her out of the country, and she rebuilt her music in London. Kefaya, the London trio of guitarist Giuliano Modarelli, keys player Al MacSween and drummer Joost Hendrickx, take their name from the Arabic word for enough, a cry that ran through the Arab Spring. Modarelli and MacSween started the group in 2012 and built their 2016 debut, Radio International, from sessions tracked across India, Palestine, Italy and Spain, wiring folk traditions to electronics and threading political voices through the mix. They first worked with Soroor on 2019’s Songs of Our Mothers, reworking Afghan women’s songs into something harder and more electronic.

Stream “A Bright Gaze” HERE, and get a copy of Our Freedoms Must Be Won on vinyl and digital through THIS LINK