Skip to content

Tag: sirensdocumentary

Episode 204: Alma of Slave to Sirens!

Alma Doumani is the bassist for Slave to Sirens, an all-women thrash metal band from Lebanon that gained international attention through the documentary Sirens, which depicts the lives of the band members over three years. Outside of music, Alma is also a photographer and video producer. 

In the episode, Alma talks us through her love for the complexity of metal music, how she got connected to the band, and how the documentary process started with a Facebook message from Rita Baghdadi. She also describes what it was like to have such pivotal moments in her and her bandmates’ lives thoroughly documented, and what that was like to revisit them in the film. We collectively discuss how carefully crafted the film feels, and how it has been challenging depictions of Arab women in international media. Alma also explains her personal decision to relocate to the US and how the band continues to work long-distance. 

Stay tuned for Slave to Sirens’ new EP coming out this summer!

Alma on IG: @alma_doumani
Slave to Sirens on IG: @slavetosirensband

Also!  You can also find the band’s music on Spotify, Deezer, Apple Music, YouTube, Anghami, Soundcloud…
Leave a Comment

Episode 195 [in English]: Intensity and Exhaustion

We’ve got a personal episode this week with Ellie, Alia, and Nadia! 

A lot of the discussion focuses on one particularly eventful day for Alia and Nadia that included:

  • Alia attending a protest in solidarity with Iranian women’s rights, along with some friends from Iran, who discussed how optimism and political energy varies across micro-generations. 
  • The puppet/public art project Walk With Amal, which was heartwarming, but also brought up complicated feelings about the need for art to create empathy towards refugees.
  • The documentary Sirens about the Lebanese all women thrash metal band Slave to Sirens, which was both beautiful in its authentic depictions of Arab women, and bittersweet in having the last three years of events in Lebanon as a backdrop. 

Also in this episode, we wonder about the origins of weird wedding rituals (and why isn’t there a Worst Man?) We also discuss the sense of tired fogginess a lot of us have been feeling lately, and the weird void that comes with unlearning internalized capitalism: if we stop basing our self worth on our productivity, what are we supposed to base it on…just being hot? Plus, we talk sapphic sci-fi storylines.

Leave a Comment