SANAM in Fight or Flight Mode on New Album ‘Sametou Sawtan’

SANAM is a Beirut-based avant-rock sextet that has been quickly gaining recognition in the region and beyond for bending post-rock music, free jazz and Arabic folk into sprawling eruptions of sound that feel both haunted and uncontainable. Their newly-released sophomore album, ‘Sametou Sawtan’, pushes their vision further, cracking open the conventions of Arabic free-rock and reframing it with a spirit that’s equal parts rebellious and devotional. 

The album lives in between a spooky yet spiritual space, where evocative ballads bleed into frantic noise and improvisational rock and jazz pulses through centuries-old folk traditions. It’s colossal and complex sonic arrangements with which the band attempts to process the feeling of leaving and being left behind, and its side effects, which are either dissociation and grief, or agitation and anger.

“For the last five years, it's felt like everyone is leaving Lebanon,”  Sandy Chamoun, SANAM’s lead singer, explains in the announcement for the record. “The album isn’t literally about that, but the idea that something is leaving you a distance from events, even though you’re living them, a distance from your house even though you’re inside it.” 

The opening track, ‘Harik’, sets the tone for the rest of the record with a widescreen hybrid of jittery drone-rock groove and pounding drums. It lurches forward into a jagged cluster of electronics, while Sandy Chamoun’s gasping vocals deliver melodic lines wrapped in free-flowing guitar and buzuq arrangements. It depicts the band’s relentless emotional state, which never stops oscillating between destruction and transcendence. 

Throughout the eight tracks, the sound relentlessly shapeshifts, going from a yearning ballad on ‘Goblin’ to an autotune-soaked freakout on ‘Habibon’ to capture SANAM’s constant quest for stable ground in a region that’s perpetually on the edge. Meanwhile, ‘Hamam’ reinterprets a traditional Egyptian folk song called ‘Ya Hamam Betnawah Leh’ into a slow-burning, mellow ballad carried by frizzy bass riffs and manipulated electronic textures. ‘Hadikat Al Ams’ flips a text by contemporary Lebanese writer, Paul Shaoul, into a cracked hard-rock stomp, while the title track and ‘Sayl Damei’ rework poems by the 12th-century Iranian poet and mathematician Omar Khayyam. 

Following suit with their debut, ‘Sametou Sawtan’ channels the intensity of SANAM’s live experience, while imbuing their music with both nuance and a dynamic range. The band continues to find inspiration and sample traditional Arabic folklore, recontextualising it into futuristic sonic bursts to interpret their current state in a fight or flight mode as they wrestle with the reality of the present.