SANAM joins Constellation for the release of Sametou Sawtan a new album and live dates

Constellation welcomes SANAM to the label for the release of the band’s second album this fall. The Beirut-based avant-rock sextet expands its genre-bending exploration of sound, memory, and cultural identity on Sametou Sawtan, following the acclaimed 2023 debut Aykathani Malakon on Mais Um Discos, which garnered accolades from The Guardian, The Wire, Bandcamp Daily, and Gilles Peterson.
 
SANAM merges psych/kraut, improv/skronk, electronics, goth, and jazz elements with traditional Egyptian song and modern Arabic poetry in a compelling brew of widescreen hybrid avant-rock.“Harik” opens Sametou Sawtan with a jolt: a pounding drum, blasts of razored electronics, and Sandy Chamoun’s gasping vocals, plunge the listener into a twitchy drone-rock groove where Chamoun winds hypnotic melodic lines around ricocheting guitar and buzuq. Described as “an infinite fire that burns without fuel,” the track captures SANAM’s signature blend of experimental rock and Arabic tradition, embodying a relentless emotional state that’s both destructive and transcendent—an invocation.
 
Ahead of the new album, SANAM has a slate of live dates in Canada and Europe in June and July, including festival appearance at Roskilde (DK), Musica Mondo (NL), Grin (CH), Rudolstadt (DE), Sled Island (CA), Everyseeker (CA), Suoni Per Il Popolo (CA), and two nights of special collaborative performances at Hotel2Tango studio in Constellation’s hometown of Montréal.

SANAM
Sametou Sawtan
Out 19 September 2025

The title of the second SANAM album is as alive with possibility as the Lebanese band’s music. Sametou Sawtan translates from the Arabic to ‘I Heard A Voice’. Spooky or spiritual, however one reads the phrase, it speaks to the ability of sound and language to cause pause, steal attention, and open us to the moment. Likewise, the music of SANAM blurs tender frenzies and fire-scorched ballads, collapsing free-flowing rock and jazz frameworks into deeply rooted Arabic tradition. To hear them in full flight is to be held in the present and reorientated towards an open horizon.

Work on Sametou Sawtan began in early 2024. Initial ideas formed at Tunefork Studios in Beirut were fleshed out in April during a residency at Beit Faris, a medieval house in the coastal city of Byblos. The sextet: Sandy Chamoun (vocals), Antonio Hajj (bass), Farah Kaddour (buzuq), Anthony Sahyoun (guitar, synth), Pascal Semerdjian (drums), and Marwan Tohme (guitars), were joined by producer Radwan Ghazi Moumneh (Jerusalem In My Heart). The album’s last two tracks are recordings from the Beit Faris sessions, while the rest were captured at La Frette Studios in Paris during the band’s summer 2024 European tour.

The record processes feelings of distance and dislocation. “For the last five years it feels like everyone is leaving Lebanon,” explains Chamoun. “The album isn’t literally about that, but the idea that something is leaving you….A distance from events even though you’re living them, a distance from your house even though you’re inside it.”

Whether in the yearning ballad “Goblin” or the slow-burning, autotune-doused freakout of “Habibon”, Sametou Sawtan captures the striving for stable ground in a world seldom capable of offering it. It rides the mesmerising intensity of the SANAM live experience while affording their music nuance, depth, and tremendous dynamic range. Like their debut, lyrics for many tracks are borrowed, words placed into new contexts to process the present. “Hamam” reinterprets an Egyptian folk song. In “Hadikat Al Ams”, the cracked hard-rock stomp propels text by contemporary Lebanese writer Paul Shaoul. And both “Sayl Damei” and the title track use poems by twelfth century Iranian poet and groundbreaking mathematician Omar Khayyam. “When you read something from Omar, you feel a connection to now,” Chamoun says. “The feeling that there’s not a clear path.”

Sametou Sawtan also features two songs with Chamoun’s own lyrics, including opener “Harik”. It was the seed of the album, written by Chamoun in February 2024, with the band building the track around her words. It begins with a shudder, razored electronics, and gasping voice perforating pounding drums before the band locks into triumphant ascent. It is about immersion in “an infinite fire,” Chamoun reveals. She wrote the lyrics to “Tatayoum” alone before bringing them to the band. It reflects a different kind of intensity, “a loop, an obsession,” she suggests. Buzuq weaves through hovering electronics and urgent drums while Chamoun recites Arabic words describing love. The incessant energies explored in these tracks aren’t necessarily negative. She compares their intensity to a writer locked in a train of thought, for better or worse.
 
“It’s not about being depressed or sad,” says Chamoun. “It’s a trap, but it can also be magical.”

SANAM LIVE
June 2025 • Canada
June/July 2025 • Europe
 
14.06  Halifax (CA) Everyseeker
18.06  Calgary (CA) Sled Island
21.06  Montréal (CA) Suoni Per Il Popolo
23.06  Montréal (CA) Hotel2Tango
24.06  Montréal (CA) Hotel2Tango
27.06  Amersfoort (NL) Musica Mundo Festival
28.06  Roveredo (CH) Grin Festival
30.06  Ljubliana (SL) Channel Zero
01.07  Zagreb (HR) Mochvara
02.07  Hamburg (DE) MS Stubnitz
03.07  Roskilde (DK) Roskilde Festival
04.07  Rudolstadt (DE) Rudolstadt Festival
05.07  Rudolstadt (DE) Rudolstadt Festival
07.07  Prague (CZ) Vila Štvanice (via Heartnoize)
09.07  Biel (CH) Pod’Ring Festival