Drew Citron of Beverly at Elsewhere in Brooklyn.

The Groundbreaking Rage of Lebanon’s Only All-Female Thrash Metal Band

“Rita Baghdadi’s new documentary Sirens might nominally be about the Middle East’s only all-female thrash metal band, but its heart can be found in the relationship between its two primary subjects: guitarists Lilas Mayassi and Shery Bechara. The two met at a riot, Mayassi recalls in the film, and the electricity between them felt instantaneous. They immediately bonded over music.

Sirens, which debuted this week at the virtual Sundance Film Festival, captures a band in flux. After Mayassi and Bechara founded Slave to Sirens, they initially kept their connection a secret from their bandmates. The detritus of their now-defunct romance has begun to erode the group’s cohesion by the time we meet them—a major problem considering, as one man notes later in the doc, an all-female metal band in Lebanon doesn’t have many replacement options when someone quits.”

Read the full piece here