Zahra is a musician, composer, performer and award-winning director of the Young Women’s Music Project. She is based in Oxford where she was born and raised as a second-generation immigrant, her father having emigrated to the UK from Iran and her mother being Irish. Thoughts on identity run as an undercurrent through her creative process as she connects the different cultures she embodies. She released her self-produced EPs Wednesday’s Child and Atigheh under the name Despicable Zee. Her previous body of work centred around Zahra’s reflections on the experience of immigration and existing between cultures which are worlds apart. She wove in samples from Iranian ballads, lullabies from her Irish mother and Iranian grandmother, and sounds of her son that have been collected as he grows up, pockets of childhood captured in the quiet moments. 

Alongside releasing their own music, Zahra has toured the UK and Europe drumming for acts such as Lafawndah, Young Knives, and a residency with Stealing Sheep. She performed Atigheh on the BBC Introducing stage at Latitude, before taking the EP on tour across the UK and then onto supporting Islet on their album tour. It has been described as “a single ripple in a chain of intergenerational motion,” as Zahra sings “to understand why her father left and what he left behind”. She explored the balance of chaos and love attached to parenthood, longing to belong, and being homesick for a place you never knew. It asks what home means to you and, leaving spaces between words punctuated with scattered beats, it waits for you to answer.

She now performs under her real name, Zahra Haji Fath Ali Tehrani, marking a shift in creative direction. They Say, the first single from her upcoming EP, introduces this scope that draws on themes of protection, parenthood, survival and recovery in the wake of abuse. A wake up call, a call to action.

Words by Siam Hatzaw Photo by Agnes Diaconu