The album was written in Mirzadegan’s childhood bedroom in the wake of a break-up, a collection of finger-picked folk songs which paints a series of memories, longings and confessions in the palette of the titular hue. But though the present loss hangs heavy, Mirzadegan also digs towards a deeper seam of sadness. One ingrained at her centre, accumulated not only across one life but an entire family history. Here, old wounds are not so much sources of pain as shafts leading towards something older and more fundamental, and Ava Mirzadegan follows these passageways as deep as they might allow her in the hope that allowing light into these dark spaces is to begin to process and heal.

But before Dark Dark Blue was another album. One which Mirzadegan could never quite finish to her satisfaction, and thus never saw the light of day. That is, until now. Because driven by the dehumanising experience of watching the country of your heritage being invaded illegally, as well as desire to do something tangible for the people suffering on the ground in Iran, she has decided to release that album, For the Light, via new imprint Vital Records, with all proceeds going to the Red Crescent.

“I want it to be known that For the Light is an unfinished record,” Mirzadegan says, though the fact it is being released speaks to the urgency of the moment and depth of feeling which accompanies it. The album is something of a time capsule of a specific period, one in which a personal bereavement came to reconfigure an entire understanding of death. Grief hurts beyond all expectation, and it hurts this way for everyone. If Dark Dark Blue was a passage towards healing, For the Light is the standstill before such a process might start. Those weeks and months where loss is nothing more than pain, and every link to the past seems to shine with a precious ephemerality.

Released into a present context, this effect is further magnified, and For the Light takes on an even more striking resonance. In a world where entire civilisations can be threatened and genocide is enacted freely, the album plays as an attempt to preserve the human in the face of almost unimaginable horror. Or at least remind some small section of the world that Iranians exist and feel and suffer like anyone else. “I uploaded a song about losing my mother while fearing the loss of the country in which my mother, and her mother before her, were born,” she continues. “It felt like the only thing I could do to keep from drowning in hopelessness and to remind myself that no matter whatever darkness came at nightfall, I will always carry their life light within me.”

That song, opener and lead single ‘Pavement’, is the first available ahead of the release on 10th May, Mother’s Day. “In this empty room / I can feel you,” Mirzadegan sings in the opening lines, before the track moves to its plaintive refrain: “She is gone.” But within the sorrow lies something else. A fondness, yes, but more than that. A strange kind of defiance. Which is all any bereaved person truly has left in the wake of their loss. The promise to remember, persevere, endure. As Walter Benjamin famously wrote: “The only historian capable of fanning the spark of hope in the past is the one who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he is victorious.” We must take every available shot at this enemy, no matter how hopeless the action might feel.

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