Enerjy by Liraz

“A vibrant, colorful, and groovy set of Middle Eastern-rooted pop inflected with psych, funk, and disco flavors”
KEXP (review)“You really can’t fault the quality and production, the songs and delivery. The emotional charge, the anguish and lament are unmistakable, even at its most lush and upbeat. Liraz disarms a powerful statement with elan and skill to produce an incredible lively and danceable record of pop excellence”
Monolith Cocktail“The fabulous Liraz”
Lopa Kothari, BBC Radio 3, Music Planet★ UK Press reaction to latest album Roya ★“Roya is simply fantastic. You need these disco bangers in your life”
★★★★ MOJO

“Singing in a voice that acknowledges Western influences from Kate Bush to Tori Amos, Liraz’s hybrid songs are heartfelt exhortations to smashing the boundaries of the divisive culture wars raging around her”
UNCUT

“Liraz has outdone herself – her new third album Roya is easily her best recording yet … Stunning”
★★★★ Songlines (Top of the World Album)

“The songs tell of heartache, both political and personal,
with a timely feminist twist”
The Wire

Singer, actress and cultural conduit for peace, Liraz releases a new collection of four songs, primed with an intensity and a raw musical revolt, energising the Middle Eastern musical landscape, sung in Farsi and driven by her deep desire for positive energy and much needed global harmony and light.

Born in Israel with Iranian roots, Liraz’s world balances on and revolves around multiple cultural circles. An actor and singer Liraz released her third and latest album Roya on Glitterbeat Records in 2022, an exhilarating blend of retro-Persian sonics, recorded in secrecy in Istanbul with her band from Tel Aviv and risk-defying Iranian musicians fromTehran. A year prior, her album Zan gave rise to the Songlines award for Best Artist leading to multiple international tours and billing on festivals like Roskilde, Womad & Rio Loco in Toulouse.

Her new EP, co-written and recorded with Uri Brauner Kinrot (Ouzo Bazooka and Boom Pam) is all sung in Farsi. Lead single Haarf which translates to ‘talk’ is part disco, part rock ‘n roll with its synth lines all enriched with a pan-middle eastern touch drawing influence from Liraz’s musical worlds but just as important to the outcome was Liraz’s band. She explains, “I like to reveal the different layers of each person in my band. We’re all from different backgrounds and cultures and we’ve grown up in a complex country (Israel). We began writing ‘Haarf’ together, in a colourful time, which quickly changed and got a lot darker”.

Outspoken about her desire for peace in the conflict between Israel and Palestine, the song Haarf, alludes to the danger of ‘talk’, and nonsense narratives on social media or other medias that has dominated and driven the war. Indeed, it is this rise, globally, of online and real world and judgemental rhetoric that divides us and creates divisions, that the song refers to.

The prose from the remaining tracks take a more reflective and relationship approach yet musically continues where Haarf left off, with garage rhythms, snappy snare drums, cosmic synths and of course Liraz’s exquisite vocals, all sung in Farsi.

An artist, actor and dedicated Mom, the future holds many uncertainties, personally and globally but with poetry books of Rumi and Hafez under her arms, and with a crack band of her favourite musicians to hand, Liraz will continue with her defiant, women-centric and peace promoting call outs. Quite simply, “Now is the time to change the energy frequency”.