Releasing music as Sabreen, Auckland-raised Bangladeshi singer-songwriter Sabreen Islam is a multi-disciplinary artist, writer, poet and songwriter who crafts cinematic, often heart-wrenching stories. She released a debut EP titled ‘Room Service’ in 2023, and among other accolades last year was selected as a YWCA Y25 laureate for creating positive change in Aotearoa. Composing often sweet folk pop tunes with disarmingly candid and direct lyrics, Sabreen’s sophomore EP ‘Forget Me When I’m Gone’ is a definite artistic progression, reaching new realms of cultural diversity and thematic cohesion. She walked along the tracks with Nur Peach.

Sabreen Islam has always told deeply personal stories. In 2022 she released a poetry anthology titled Spring Clean, which delves unabashedly into her teenage struggles with bullying and mental health.

Her musical debut, the 2023 EP ‘Room Service’ has the same confessional tone, wrapped in an indie-pop sheen. Sabreen’s goal for her September 2026 released ‘Forget Me When I’m Gone’ EP, was to take it even deeper.

“After ‘Room Service’ came out, I was really feeling like I needed to put out music that felt a bit more honest, and closer to what I actually write about most of the time. With ‘Room Service,’ I was in an era of choosing songs that I thought would be easy to listen to, and easily digestible, and those were the ones I would put out – but it wasn’t really reflective of my full artistry and things I like to write about.”

Case in point is Countryman, the oldest song on the new EP. It was already written when Sabreen was working on ‘Room Service’ but she didn’t yet feel confident releasing it.

“I knew that when I wrote it, I wasn’t quite ready to produce it. I was like, ‘I feel like I’m not at the stage where I can do this justice, so I’m gonna sit on this for a bit.’”

The slow-building narrative ballad tells the tear-jerking story of Joe Kum Yung, a Chinese immigrant to NZ who became a murder victim. Sabreen learned his tragic story through her university studies (she’s studying towards a Law and Sociology degree at the University of Auckland).

“He came here as a gold miner in the late 1800s, and lived here for decades, but then he was shot and killed by a white supremacist in 1905. Maybe it was because we were in lockdown or I was really craving human connection, but that story just made me cry when I learned about it in class.

“It made me think a lot about the history of racism in this country and I wrote Countryman very shortly after I learned about it.  I had no idea about this man or his story, and I never would have known if it wasn’t for this class that I had taken. I found it really sad that not a lot of people knew about him. I’ve always been a big fan of urban folk, that sort of folk song storytelling, so I wanted to use that to tell his story. It was very emotional and made me think of my own parents who are Asian immigrants.”

Countryman was also the first song produced for the EP. With her previous producer Sophie Bialostocki, aka Lévyne, having moved to London, Sabreen turned to Nate Selway, who’d been playing in her band.

“I met Nate on Instagram. He played keys for me for my first headline show, and we got along really well. He said to me, ‘If you ever need any production stuff, let me know.’ Sophie had just gone overseas, and so I went to him with maybe the most difficult song to produce, which was Countryman. I was like, ‘Hey, I know we just met, but can you help me produce this incredibly difficult, historical, complex song?’”

Selway ended up producing the whole EP, working between his home recording space and Auckland studios Depot Sound, Parachute Studios and Big Fan.

“It ended up being such a joyful production process. He was so receptive to all my ideas. He knew how important the story was to me. We’ve been working together ever since, and I want to keep making music with him forever. He’s awesome and has become such a good friend. I’m rooting for him because he’s gonna start releasing his own artist stuff very soon.”

The resulting EP balances apparent youthful levity with a self-assured maturity. On opener Therapy she sings, “I sound unbearably pretentious,” but there is a remarkable lack of pretension to Sabreen’s innocently sweet vocals and lyrical candour, which are backed by a shimmering, delicate and varied soundscape.

As one might expect from an aspiring author (she’s working on a novel with dreams of being published someday), there is a strong theme which ties ‘Forget Me When I’m Gone’ together.

“I was in a real period of flux in my life, where I was saying goodbye to a lot of things, and I was also watching the world around me devolve – for lack of a better term – with the rise of AI, and this real sense of urgency to hold on to human-made art. I wanted to make a body of work that was a group of stories about being forgotten, or wanting to be remembered, and really toy with that idea that all people want to do is to be remembered by their loved ones – or if it’s a legacy they’re after? It’s such a human concept to want that.”

The concept informed the decision to seek out players of uncommon instruments, in her own culture and others.

“We made a real effort to record niche instruments that maybe aren’t played as much anymore, but deserve to be continued on. Ones from my culture, sitar and tabla, and other random ones, like the mandolin, and the pedal steel – things that I really believe shouldn’t be forgotten.

“It took months to find the players, especially a sitar player. You might assume that there would be a lot more than there are, but there really is not a lot here. It was well worth the hunt, because with the people we ended up with are so good at what they do, and it was a real honour to have them on my songs.”

The sitar, played by Sargam Madhur, features prominently on the EP’s closing track The End, adding a dreamlike quality to the romantically existential song for Palestine. Sabreen was inspired to write The End after hearing an anonymous message from a young person in Gaza.

“They were confessing their love for someone who had died in the genocide. It made me think about what I would want to say to my loved ones if my whole world was crumbling around me, or I found myself in the middle of this awful situation I had no control over.

“It made me think about how all people want to do is just to love and be loved, and so I wrote this song to immortalise that person’s message. It’s a song about and for Palestine, but at the very core it’s a love song. I think if you were to listen to it without knowing the context, you might just think it’s a regular love song, but it’s something I felt like as an artist was very important for me to say in this moment in time. We included the sitar in the production as an ode from my culture to Palestine.

“I have a friend whose child is half-Bangladeshi, half-Palestinian, and in the last part of the song, which is just ambient noise, she very kindly recorded her baby laughing. It really felt like one of those moments where I was just a vessel for this art to come through. I can’t even really take credit for it.”

Sabreen has also released an Arabic version of the song, featuring flotilla activist Rana Hamida.

“When I released The End, weirdly it did not feel like the end. I felt like the song had more to say, and there was more that could be done. I had been invited to perform the song at a rally that was held to welcome back our flotilla activists, and one of those is Rana Hamida, and she is just the coolest human being I’ve ever met in my life – and she has the most gorgeous voice you’ve ever heard! I messaged her, and I was like, ‘Hi, would you like to create an Arabic version of the song with me?’ I wasn’t even expecting her to reply, so I’m still in disbelief that the song exists. We wrote an Arabic verse, and then I sang in my own language for the first time.”

Released online as a single, titled The End (Arabic Version), she describes the experience as terrifying.

“I’m from Bangladesh, but I didn’t speak a lot of Bangla growing up. I’d speak it with my parents, but really not that much elsewhere because of a variety of reasons. As an adult, I’ve really been trying to regain that relationship with my language. It was quite nerve-wracking, standing there in the recording booth and singing in my own language. It felt very vulnerable, but very important, and it was a lovely bonding moment with my dad. My dad helped me to write the Bangla lyrics, and I would love to sing more in my own language. It’s such a beautiful lyrical language, it lends itself to music so nicely.”

On other tracks, such as the sprawling Landmines, Sabreen takes a more confessional tone, addressing her personal battles with mental health.

“I’ve struggled since I was a teenager with depression and PTSD, and it is really hard to live with those things. You never know as a person living with PTSD when you’re going to be triggered by something. In Landmines I used the metaphor of walking through a field of landmines where you don’t know if you’re going to step on something and then bam, have a really unpleasant feeling.

“Writing that song was very cathartic and I think it’s a real moment of honesty in my work, where I really forced myself to accept that how I was feeling sucked – and that that was okay. That you’re allowed to feel, and you don’t have to excuse it or apologise for it.”

The EP’s punchy pop-punk opening track Therapy tackles the same issue from a more lighthearted angle.

“Therapy is kind of like Landmines’ goofy sister. I was going through some upheaval in my life, and some mental health struggles as a young woman, and I was just so sick of it that it ended up being funny. The real thesis line of the song is… sometimes shit’s so bad it’s funny. I wanted to make a fun moment out of how I was feeling. I really love songs where the production is so upbeat and makes you dance, but then the lyrics are really depressing, so that’s what I wanted to do.”

Written on acoustic guitar they started off recording Therapy that way, but Sabreen felt it wasn’t living up to its full potential.

“About then I went through a phase of listening to a bunch of Disney songs from the early 2000s, like Seven Things by Miley Cyrus and the early Demi Lovato stuff. I just loved how angsty and punchy it was and I was like, ‘Wait, this could actually work for Therapy. This could be an awesome thing to bring back!’

“It really stretched my comfort zone. It’s not a type of genre that I am overly familiar with, but Nate loves pop punk so much, so I was in good hands. He had a lot of fun with it and I let him take the reins with the production on that one.”

The bouncy, guitar driven soft-pop Nina provides light relief mid-EP, while not diverging from the subject matter of being remembered. Showing off her storytelling skills, it spins a narrative of a young pop star named Nina who ‘wants her life to be a work of art’, told from the perspective of a friend who witnesses her rise to fame and subsequent fall from grace. The song was born out of Sabreen reflecting on the toxicity of cancel culture, especially when aimed at young woman.

“We love to launch them into the stratosphere, and then people just as much enjoy tearing them down. When celebrities are getting cancelled or whatever, obviously sometimes it’s for a valid reason, but other times it’s really not.

“I always wondered, when celebrities are facing these hate trains, what their families and friends think. Because at the end of the day, we don’t know these people. It’s a brand that we know. People assume that they know the person behind it, but we don’t. I wanted to write a song from that perspective of, if my best friend shot into superstardom and then got cancelled, what would I feel like?

“I wrote a story about these two girls who are best friends, and then one of them becomes mega famous, and how the one who’s left behind perceives her stardom and all the things that come with it.”

Made with support from NZ On Air