Home / News / Lebanese Hardcore Punk Band TA2REEBAN Release Insane Debut EP!!! Shit is FIRE! [Lebanon]

Lebanese Hardcore Punk Band TA2REEBAN Release Insane Debut EP!!! Shit is FIRE! [Lebanon]

By on January 19, 2025

“We just came out with our first EP in September, released it the day before Israel blew up thousands of pagers in Lebanon and within a few days the war radically expanded.”

Today we get to help celebrate the upcoming record release show for Lebanese hardcore punk band TA2REEBAN. Even though the EP is already up on all streaming sites, the band is officially celebrating the release of the record on February 1st.

There is just something so special about where worldwide hardcore punk is heading with MORE and MORE hardcore bands embracing singing in their own mother tongue. Fuck anyone else – this is about their community and what matters to them the most. There is so much passion and vitriol when bands sing about local issues in a tongue that punches you right in the gut. ON TA2REEBAN’s debut EP, amongst the anger in the straight up hardcore music, it’s those vocals that smack the fuck outta you the hardest.

The band were kind enough to give us a lowdown on how they came together UNDER the social/political climate that Lebanon has been in this past year or so…

“We just came out with our first EP in September, released it the day before Israel blew up thousands of pagers in Lebanon and within a few days the war radically expanded. So we canceled our plans for an album release show and now that there’s a ceasefire, we’re back and giving that EP a proper release.

We started a year ago. It was four months into the war and the genocide in Palestine. All of us have lived outside Lebanon and been part of punk and hardcore scenes elsewhere and the scene in Lebanon was pretty quiet, so we had a punk event at a friend’s house, and while we were there talking we decided to start the band. Its name means “approximately,” because people kept asking if we had a name and we would tell them “sort of” because we had a few candidates but hadn’t agreed on one.”

“We’re influenced by Limp Wrist, G.L.O.S.S., Bad Brains, but also a lot of Arabic hardcore, like DEMOKHRATIA, HARAM, and TAQBIR. A lot of the lyrics deal with utopia/dystopia—a world that’s either totally fixed, with no more capitalism and zionism, or gone to complete shit. Those two impulses felt pretty close to us during this war, which is when we wrote and recorded the EP.

The hardcore scene in Lebanon was really strong from around 2005 until around 2014, and kept going in some form until around 2019. But a lot of people emigrate in Lebanon—the country doesn’t offer a lot of opportunities—and others left the scene or started playing more Arabic music. In 2019 there was the start of the economic crisis, then there was COVID, then the Beirut port blew up. All of it hit the music scene pretty hard, and pushed even more people to emigrate. But there’s great bands coming up, and the three of us are part of a collective that’s putting on hardcore shows and there’s a ton of energy and excitement, especially from young people who weren’t around five, six years ago. We wanna see as many hardcore bands as possible in Lebanon, and maybe for foreign acts to tour here again too.”

As per the DIY ethos that is so part and parcel of any true hardcore punk scene worldwide, the members of this incredible band are part of a collective called DAJJEH, a collective of 7 people putting on hardcore shows in Beirut for the past year.

Please go follow these links to stay up to date on the Lebanese hardcore scene:

DAJJEH: https://www.instagram.com/dajjeh.beirut/

TA2REEBAN: https://www.instagram.com/ta2reeban.band/

And then go listen to one of our favorite things we’ve heard in 2025 thus far (Yes, we know this was released in 2024).

 

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