Skin a Rat, the opening track on SASAMI’s second album, Squeeze, forces you to take notice. With its visceral, violent lyrics – “In a skin rat mood/ Cut them/ Crush them/ Big, big boot” – and heavy rock instrumentation, SASAMI’s growl feels less like a warning shot and more like a statement of intent.

The objective is to weave her own painful personal history – in particular the Zainichi people, a Korean diaspora that migrated to Japan in the early 20th century, and still face oppression to this day – into the context of her life today. SASAMI audaciously tackles this complex task by creating an album that is expansive enough to act as a tonic to, and vessel of, the displacement felt by communities like her own.

The songs on Squeeze are carved to convey the racket of emotions that can be felt by marginalised people at any given time. Desperation and resignation brim softly in the shoegaze-y stand-out Call Me Home. Anger takes the form of intense metal sounds (Megadeth’s Dirk Verbeuren plays drums on Need it to Work and Skin a Rat) that are at times disquieting, but not off-putting. Rather, this collection of songs feels like a reclamation of rage, as she so urgently describes in the No Home-featuring title track: “I can transform/ I can conform/ Liquid body/ I just wanna be free.”

Michelle Kambasha