My browser history tells me that I first heard Taraneh through the song Salt Water, for which she collaborated with another artist called Evanora:Unlimited:

That was weird and unique enough that I added her yet-to-be-released album to my playlist. It came out last month and hit my ears today.

It’s called New Age Prayer and it’s one of the most compelling things I’ve heard this year. The tracks on this thing range from 90’s Garbage/electro/industrial infected alt rock like Ask & Recieve (embedded in the header of the post) and Superstar:

… to dreamy indie rock with hints of Elliot Smith on tracks like On Repeat and the title track:

…to the industrial/techno/anxious electronic layers of Prophet:

The music is as unusual as Tanareh’s history – she’s Iranian American, fluent in Farsi and has worked as an investigative journalist with USA Today. You can hear and see elements of her Muslim heritage in the video above. This interview from Paper Magazine goes into some depth about her history and influences:

I speak Farsi. Both of my parents are from Iran and I was raised Muslim. I spent all of my summers growing up in Iran. And in some ways, I was raised between Iran and Cleveland, which are like super extreme opposites. Similar in a way too, though. Persian culture is richly poetic and beautiful, and it’s a culture of revolutionaries in a sense. We don’t like to follow rules, which is ironic considering the current regime. But with the current regime, there’s this oppressive aspect to the way that religion is imposed or integrated into the culture, right? It’s an Islamic Republic. There’s mandatory hijab for women, there are restrictions on how men and women can interact in public. I think there’s a difference between the spiritual manifestation of religion and the institutional application.

In another interview with Office Magazine, she discusses the end of the music genre in relation to this album:

…it’s super multi-genre exploring a lot of very new sounds for me in terms of genre and the way that things are presented. And it’s really exciting because we’ve entered this era where genres are almost dead in a way. I don’t know if it has to do with the way that we consume media, but that genres kind of blend in this interesting way that I’ve never really experienced before, at least in my lifetime, or as far as I know in the past. I feel like I’m seeing more artists who are more and more kind of liberated in terms of what they present in their music. And this record is very much that as well. I wanted to do grunge tracks. I wanted to do a tele-disco. I wanted to do industrial, lo-fi, whatever. It’s a bit offbeat to have an album that is so all over the place, but there is this cohesive thread of the voice and the songwriting ultimately bringing everything together.

She’s right about the cohesive thread — as wildly divergent as the styles on this record are at times, none of them feel out-of-place. I think we’re in a kind of golden age of music, and this is a good example.

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