For almost as long as it’s existed, heavy metal has been used as protest music. On Black Sabbath’s Paranoid, the first thing you’re barraged with is War Pigs: a seven-minute savaging of the politicians who instigated the Vietnam war. Iron Maiden once had their mascot, Eddie, murder Margaret Thatcher on a single’s artwork; Metallica and Megadeth spent the 1980s lambasting cold war superpowers that didn’t know whether to shake hands or nuke each other. Nikan Khosravi, singer and guitarist of Iranian/Norwegian thrashers Confess, views his band as another protest act in the metal lineage. “I’m the kid who told the emperor: ‘You’re naked!’” he exclaims with pride and excitement on a call from Norway. However, the five-piece don’t write their brutish tracks about some faraway conflict, or satirise a government certain to ignore them. In late 2015, Khosravi and his Confess bandmate, Arash Ilkhani, were arrested in their native Iran. Their crime was writing anti-establishment metal music, for which they were charged with blasphemy and propaganda against the state and taken to Tehran’s notorious Evin prison. They endured 18 months of incarceration while awaiting trial before making bail and, following a guilty verdict that sentenced them to six years in prison, sought asylum in Norway. Revenge at All Costs, Confess’s first album since the hellish ordeal, documents the last seven years, with Khosravi and Ilkhani now flanked by a trio of Norwegian members. “It’s a storytelling record,” Khosravi states, before comparing it to 2Pac’s All Eyez on Me and Eminem’s Recovery, with a snigger. “It’s a personal take on the stuff that happened. We wanted to make the statement that you cannot keep someone from their dreams. Our second album was called In Pursuit of Dreams, and we were arrested two weeks after releasing it. We were pursuing our dreams and, for our dreams, we went to jail.” Much like Khosravi himself, Revenge … is loud, confident and outspoken. The song Evin booms with immense chords (produced by Lamb of God and Clutch collaborator Gene “Machine” Freeman) and Phoenix Rises follows in a flurry of athletic guitar leads, as Khosravi growls lyrics that taunt his former jailers: “You thought I’m surely dead / but you’re not gonna see me quiet until my motherfucking body goes red”. “When I moved to Norway, I released that song and I guess they [the Iranian government] got fucking upset,” the frontman says. “They were like, ‘OK, your six years are turning into 12-and-a-half years and 74 lashes.’ What the fuck? It’s the 21st century – 74 lashes?!” Khosravi was born to a middle-class family in 1993 in Tehran, his mother a teacher and his father an accountant. He characterises it as a liberal household, enamoured with the arts, in a conservative neighbourhood. After hearing his dad play old Pink Floyd records growing up, he discovered heavier bands such as Slayer and Slipknot when he was 13 years old. At 15, he co-founded Confess. The band debuted in 2012 with the album Beginning of Dominion. It zeroed in on religion, critiquing it in a country whose official census claims 99.5% of the population are Muslim. By the time Confess released follow-up In Pursuit of Dreams in October 2015, the frontman was being heavily monitored by the Iranian government. He grew convinced that his phone had been bugged, as he heard inexplicable buzzing and echoes whenever he was on a call. Later, when he was out with his then-girlfriend in Tehran, he noticed a man following them for “four or five hours”, taking photos of them. “Dumb as I am, I went and confronted this guy,” he says. “I was convinced he was a government agent, but I just went for it: ‘Why the fuck are you following us?!’ He was like, ‘Whatever,’ but I knew what was going on. “That same day, someone had stolen my girlfriend’s phone,” he adds. “So my theory is that someone used the GPS or read our texts about meeting up and, from there, they followed us.” The release of In Pursuit of Dreams gave the Iranian government all the ammo it needed to finally strike. The song Thorn Within, which questioned the existence of God, became the backbone of the musician’s blasphemy charge. Meanwhile, the lyrics of Teh-Hell-Ran – which include “This town is not a place to live / In here you must kill to not die” – were a cornerstone of allegations of propaganda against the state. “They are planning on making an empire in the Middle East, so they need to go out and invest in propaganda,” Khosravi says. “It doesn’t surprise me that they arrested me because, without knowing, I was standing in front of their billion-dollar propaganda system. We were singing a different narrative, and young kids are more driven to another young guy that’s telling them that.” Khosravi was arrested in his family home in November 2015. He watched for two hours – “the longest two hours of my life” – as the Revolutionary Guard tore up his room to confiscate evidence before he was dragged away. “My mum asked, ‘Where are you taking my son?’ They said, ‘You can ask after him at Evin prison.’” Ilkhani was taken into custody simultaneously. “It was like Fast & Furious,” Khosravi claims. “There were cars and sirens because they thought he was running away, but he was just driving home.” Khosravi was placed in solitary confinement for three months. “They put you in a cell, close the door and then you wait for the interrogations to start. They become kind of fun, because you just want to get out of that fucking cell, but the interrogations only lasted for two weeks – so for two months and two weeks, I was in a cell 23 hours a day without seeing anyone. “There is just a wall in front of you with a big door, and silence – an indescribable silence. The light in your room is on 24/7, because that’s another way they can put you under pressure. On top of that, just imagine, at your last interrogation, the guy, when he’s leaving the room, is like, ‘I don’t think I’m gonna write a good report on you,’ and then he just leaves. You start thinking; you cannot go to sleep. There’s no clock in your room, there’s no mirror. You’re basically taken out of society.” Released from solitary, he stayed in prison for a further 15 months, with he and Ilkhani only getting out by posting an $80,000 bail. The trauma and stress caused by the incarceration ended Khosravi’s relationship with his girlfriend. Plus, out of fear of being considered guilty by association, none of his friends saw him once he was freed. “I didn’t meet a person that I knew for eight years,” he says. “When I got handed my six-year [prison sentence], my mum told me, ‘You’ve gotta leave,’” Khosravi continues. “She convinced me, along with my dad: ‘We’d rather see you leave than see you go to jail.’” So, he fled. Khosravi crossed the Iran/Turkey border without a passport (it’s the only part of his story he doesn’t want to go into detail about), before being offered asylum in Norway. There, at long last, he reunited with Ilkhani and reactivated Confess. “Now, nobody’s gonna come to the door,” Khosravi says, the relief in his voice audible. “Now, I have so much potential to cause damage from far away.” When asked if Revenge at All Costs represents victory for him, Khosravi says yes, but subsequently seems torn. On the one hand, every step he takes and word he speaks as a free man defies his one-time captors; on the other, he is still full of hatred. “We are making the statement that you cannot do this to a human,” he declares. “Thousands would quit or turn the other cheek, but now you have someone coming after you with the only weapons that he has: a pen and a guitar.” Revenge at All Costs is out now on Rexius Records.