Hazeen is an anti-racist Muslim death metal band comprised of Can Yalcinkaya (drums), Safdar Ahmed (vocals and guitar) and Kian Dayani (bass guitar). We are very excited to announce the release of our debut album . We recorded the album with Michael Imielski at Shhh studio in Granville in late 2020 and it features our good friends Kazem Kazemi and Susie Hurley as guest musicians. Sovereign Murders will be released as part of a larger artwork, called Border Farce, to be shown in the upcoming documenta fifteen exhibition in Kassel Germany, which runs from 18 June to 25 September. 

‘Sovereign murders’ was a slip of the tongue made by Immigration Minister (later to become Prime Minister) of Australia Scott Morrison to the media in 2014. Morrison was lauding the government’s policy of refugee deterrence, for which his department devised the title ‘operation sovereign borders’ — which he accidentally referred to as ‘operation sovereign murders’. This slip occurred just weeks after the death of the Iranian refugee Reza Berati, who was killed within the Manus Island detention centre by two men contracted by the Australian government to protect refugees.

Extreme metal, with its high-level of artifice, performativity and underlying misanthropic (spiritual-Romantic) themes is useful in this context. A form that self-consciously mimics the vernacular of social hate and exclusion provides a  useful analytic-deconstructive tool. Amongst the already obscure subgenres of the metal underground, ours would count as insurgent Muslim death metal – with the occasional foray into softer, perennial Sufistic/batini themes. In corpse paint we become the living dead, the victims of illegal wars, indiscriminate drone assaults, and their self-appointed avengers.

By appropriating the enormous and ever growing repertoire of historical Islamophobia, we create a poetics of terror. We are the death cult – a natural outgrowth of late capitalism – forging a new Occidentalism.