Introducing: Seera

Seera conjure a world of shadowed silhouettes, hypnotic riffs and Arabic poetry, where desert psychedelia meets rock. The all-female four-piece from Saudi Arabia draw on intimate, lived experience to explore vulnerability and emotional growth, and prove that their country’s music is more multifaceted than it’s often given credit for.

In the video for ‘Zaman’ – one of the tracks on Seera’s new Sarab EP – the band are seen in a bedroom with teen-style posters plastered on its walls, the floor littered with strewn-around sheets and piles of clothes. The distorted riffs and psych synths of the track mirrors the chaos of the room and their own inner complexities. Nora doesn’t sing from the perspective of the teenager, but from the mother’s: ‘Your room is a mess, an image of a weird world’, she belts out.

This sense of domestic relatability – of teen aesthetics and a mother’s reaction – was something Nora, Meesh, Haya and their masked, nameless drummer (who goes by the name of ‘Thing’) felt was missing from the Saudi music scene when they met in 2022. They formed Seera to carve out a space that speaks to the lived experience of young people in the region, while refusing to be confined by genre or geography. “We had all been playing for a long while,” says Nora, “but when we met, there was this natural push that only comes from being in a team where it’s no longer scary to be ourselves.”

Their songs are primarily written in the Saudi Najdi dialect, interlaced with percussive elements drawn from regional musical traditions. “Arabic is a very poetic language,” Nora explains, “and there’s a lot of rhythm in it: tabla, percussive phrasing’” Yet, rather than treating tradition as something fixed, Seera approach it as a living language – one that can bend and evolve. Their identity is rooted in its blending of genres, in its reshaping of heritage and cultural references through a contemporary lens. Traditional influences sit alongside experiments with microtonality and Arabic scales such as Rast and Saba, as well as distorted guitar lines shaped by international psych rock acts like Khruangbin and King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard, giving Seera a distinctive edge within Saudi Arabia’s fast-evolving musical landscape.

Despite their genre-blurring sound, the band are quick to point out that many assumptions about Saudi music reveal more about distance than reality. “There’s a preconception of what Saudi is and what the music might sound like,” says Nora. “But once you’re here, we fit in naturally with the music community.”

The group has so far built its reputation through a string of singles and live performances that foreground atmosphere as much as sound, and their new EP, composed of five intimate tracks, pushes that ambition further. Each song is conceived as a self-contained sonic and visual universe: on ‘Akhr Sarkha’, for instance, they weave field recordings of endangered desert animals into the composition, turning the track into a meditation on fragility, loss and survival.

Proud of what they represent without allowing it to define them, the band are conscious of the expectations placed on them as an all-women Saudi act. “We don’t reject the responsibility of being pioneers,” Nora says, “but we want to stick to what we came here to do.”

For Seera, that means returning again and again to creative honesty, even when the music is raw, emotionally charged and unconcerned with smoothing its edges. “It doesn’t have to be accessible to everyone,” they explain, “but we know there are people who will hear it, take it in, and understand what’s being expressed.”

+ Sarab is out now on CTRL Music. ‘Shams’ appears on this issue’s Top of the World compilation, track 15