'Rootless And Ruthless': Nadia Tehran Invokes Life In The Diaspora

Nadia Tehran’s debut album, Dozakh: All Lovers Hell, opens with a haunting excerpt from an interview with her father. Tehran’s father recounts his last day fighting in the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, when he drove an ammunition-filled car that exploded after it was attacked. “Death comes when it comes,” Tehran’s father recalls saying to rally his troops for that ill-fated expedition. “One should not be afraid of death.”

With her family in mind, Tehran named her album Dozakh after a Persian word for a kind of emotional hell a person finds themselves in when separated from a loved one. That sentiment of separation pervades Tehran’s experimental music.

Tehran’s parents immigrated from Iran to Sweden after the war. She says that her life in the Iranian diaspora is one of the influences behind her album. “It plays into a separation between, you know, life and death, and who am I and why am I here,” Tehran explains. “But also, it kind of translates into my separation of growing up in Sweden and feeling rootless.”