Emotional numbness as a political condition: that is the territory Kefaya and Elaha Soroor open on “Cold & Heavy – Sardo Sangin”, the lead single from their forthcoming album Our Freedoms Must Be Won – Azadi Kho Bigri. The title draws from the Dari words sardo (cold) and sangin (heavy), a direct reference to the poetry of the Afghan polymath Milad which anchors the track. It maps a specific kind of disconnection. This is the distance that opens between people who are physically present but emotionally absent, a state the band identify as a byproduct of systemic pressure rather than personal choice.

The London trio of Giuliano Modarelli, Al MacSween, and Joost Hendrickx move between traditions, and the music here remains restless. Polyrhythms shift without announcement. Synthesisers crowd the mix into immersive, heavy textures, creating grooves built for bodies moving in a room together. Against that, Elaha Soroor brings a voice whose weight comes from biography. A finalist on Afghan Star and the first female Hazara singer to perform on Afghan television, Soroor fled her home under personal threat before arriving in the UK. Her performance translates that history into a precise, grounded resistance.

Our Freedoms Must Be Won is their most direct record yet. If their 2019 Bella Union album Songs of Our Mothers drew on folk songs carried through generations of hardship, this new work confronts the mechanics behind that hardship. War and displacement appear as tools through which systems sustain themselves, with the album’s grooves and lyrics both insisting on collective survival. The group take these themes on the road through the summer, beginning at the UK’s Knockengorroch Festival in May, before moving through Sommerfestival der Kulturen in Germany, Am Schluss in Switzerland, and concluding the run at Norway’s Transform Festival in September.

Stream and listen to “Cold & Heavy – Sardo Sangin” HERE