Punk rock and heavy metal in Pakistan stays defiantly underground, starved of venues and lacking fans

Pakistan’s hardcore punk and heavy metal bands lack places to play in, and fans to hear their music, as big corporations dominate the country’s music scene

‘The whole idea of independent music is gone,’ says one of Pakistan’s most successful musicians, who moved to India until nationalists there forced him out

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Multinational Corporations are a metal band in Lahore, Pakistan, influenced by British band Napalm Death. The metal and punk rock scenes in Pakistan are tiny and starved of attention. Photo: Multinational Corporations

Published: 2:15pm, 9 Nov 2019Updated: 10:29am, 12 Nov 2019

Driving around Lahore in Pakistan on the first day of Eid-al-Adha – the Islamic festival marking prophet Ibrahim’s willingness to sacrifice his son for Allah – the megacity’s ample boulevards are empty.

As I speed through the city in the back of a rickshaw, trails of goat blood flow into the gutters next to severed cattle heads, the leftovers from the ritual sacrifice of livestock that takes place during Eid.

It’s an in-your-face introduction to a place I’m visiting to meet some of its most extreme musicians – members of Pakistan’s defiantly underground punk rock and heavy metal scenes.

Twenty-somethings Hassan Amin and Sheraz Ahmed are two of the main figures in Lahore’s small punk scene. Their projects Multinational Corporations – a politically charged metallic grindcore act influenced by British metal band Napalm Death – and shock-punk band Foreskin featured on a seven-inch compilation, Never Mind the Taqwacores, Here is the Real Deal, released in 2013 by Tian An Men 89 Records, owned by French punk rock connoisseur Luk Haas.

Punk bands in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan are pretty different from the Desi-American (meaning South Asian but born or raised in the United States) acts featured in Omar Majeed’s 2009 documentary Taqwacore: the Birth of Punk Islam. (Taqwacore is a reference to the The Taqwacores, a novel by Michael Muhammad Knight, an American writer and Muslim convert, depicting a fictitious Islamic punk rock scene. The title combines taqwa, meaning love and fear for Allah, and hardcore, a sub-genre of punk rock.)