Like all good revolutions, the current Iranian protest movement against the regime is being accompanied by music. Protest songs have always traveled farther than the protests themselves – carried across borders in ways that bodies cannot be, arriving in cities where the demonstrations are watched from a distance.
Iranian artists in the diaspora have found a global audience almost in real time, their music spreading through the same platforms the regime cannot fully shut down. Tony Mohraz is one of them. Known professionally as 021kid, and now based in the UK, Mohraz grew up in Tehran, in what he described simply as “the madness.” Rap music was pushed underground by the Islamist regime, which frowned upon it. Police showing up unannounced, not just for music but for tattoos, for the wrong look or the wrong crowd. Mohraz was part of a young generation living in Iran whose members learned early that expression is conditional, and that the wrong kind of visibility can invite consequences.
“It was a dictatorship,” he told The Jerusalem Post from London. “I couldn’t truly evolve as an artist, as a person. It’s hard out there, especially right now – with all this inflation, the regime being in the street with guns, opening [fire with] live bullets on anyone.”
From Iran to the UK
Mohraz left Iran at 21 and arrived in the UK eight years ago carrying the weight of an artist imposed on by restriction. London, however, offered freedom and space, but it also posed a new challenge: how to translate a distinctly Iranian experience into a language and a sound that could travel. He found that language in drill music.
To understand 021kid’s music, it helps to understand the generation he belongs to. Young Iranians have grown up inside cycles of protest, regime crackdown followed by silence, and protest again – whether it is 2009, 2019, 2022, or 2026.
Mohraz described watching it from an early age. “I remember I was 12. I was too young to get involved in protests or demonstrations, but I was seeing them. I was seeing the older people getting onto the street. We have the most courageous people,” he stated. “I was seeing them fighting with bare hands against this brutal regime.
“Ever since I was in Iran, we were fighting with the regime,” he said. “But the fight was different. We didn’t have freedom of speech. We couldn’t truly express our anger. So when I came here, I continued my battle.” London gave him the space to fight the battle on his terms.
If the past decade has been defined by internal unrest, 2026 marked the moment the world started paying attention to the situation of ordinary Iranians. The confrontation involving Iran, Israel, and the United States was framed around the protest movement, which began on a national level at the end of December, and saw thousands massacred on the streets of Iran in January, when the regime opened fire on crowds of protesters or hunted them down as they ran. Thousands have been left dead on the streets, and the country is now over 40 days into its second Internet shutdown, a situation that has left it difficult to find out the truth of what is really taking place there. But it was framed as the indiscriminate killing of protesters that led the US and Israel to take military action against Iran in February and March.
The Iranian regime’s power over ordinary people
Mohraz pointed to the Internet as one example of the regime’s power over ordinary people. “How come [the regime] has the audacity to come to the table with negotiations and say, ‘We won the war – we have the voice of the Iranian people,’ but the people don’t have Internet? Countries that back this – the United Kingdom, Spain, France – they don’t see this. Why don’t they just expel all these diplomats?”
There is an application called Bale – meaning “yes” – built by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). For much of the diaspora, it is currently the only way to reach family inside the country. The calls are monitored.
“Their plan, from what I’ve heard from a trusted source, is to slowly make this transition – to keep the Internet disconnected from the global network, and to keep everyone in this Bale app,” Mohraz said. “Basically, the IRGC is trying to disconnect Iran from the global Internet, just like North Korea.”
In the UK, Mohraz encountered a different kind of identity politics. Drill music, with its emphasis on locality and representation, provided a framework he immediately recognized. Emerging from south London in the early 2010s, UK drill developed as a distinct evolution of the Chicago-born genre, fusing its minimalist production with Britain’s own rap tradition. Lyrically, it is unapologetically raw, often reflecting the difficult realities of urban life, with an emphasis on confrontation, identity, and lived experience, elements that have helped define its appeal and, at times, its controversy.
Where other artists repped postcodes, Mohraz repped a city. “021 is the [telephone] code of Tehran, the city I’m from,” he explained. “When I first came to the UK, my very good friend, my neighbor, was involved in postcode wars. I wasn’t in a postcode war; I didn’t want to get involved in one – but you get the idea. Everyone’s repping their own thing. So I was like, ‘021 is the code of my city, and I’m from there.’ I’m repping my city and where I’m coming from.”
Connecting cultures through music
The music followed the same logic. Switching between English and Farsi was a deliberate strategy for Mohraz. “Farsi is not an international language,” he said. “So when I want to connect to the world, I have to speak an international language. My main objective is to show my background, show my culture, show my Persian side in English – to connect two different nations, two different worlds together with this mixture of both.”
The goal, as he framed it, is to introduce Iranian culture to audiences who might otherwise never encounter it, while still reaching the Iranian diaspora. He described seeing a YouTube reaction to one of his English-language tracks and watching the viewer light up. “They were saying, ‘Oh, finally some English,’ and I was seeing the thrill of them, how happy it made them. I’m honored to have an audience like that. When I have international listeners, that’s what I appreciate the most.”
And the importance of rapping in English, and bringing the world of Iran to a global audience, cannot be overstated. For Mohraz, songs such as “Javid Shah” or “Lion Sun” do two things at once: document and declare. They are addressed to an Iranian audience that already knows the stakes, and to a wider one that may not.
The lyrics of “Javid Shah” make no attempt at subtlety.
“Raise a glass to everyone who has died.
The market, the business, shut down.
The cry says this is the final battle.
The Pahlavis are returning to Iran.
Shame on anyone who doubted.
Spring follows the cold of this season.
The kids are gathered in the neighborhood – so tell every mother not to be afraid.”
“Lion Sun” is even less subtle.
“We’ve started this journey and there’s no turning back.
Freedom for Iran is trending on every hashtag,
And I’m ready for war,
Refusing to bow my head.”
“It comes from the heart,” he said of “Lion Sun.” “It wasn’t for any personal gain or anything. It comes from the heart, and it resonates with people’s hearts.”
Despite the obvious political dimension, Mohraz pushed back against being defined solely by it. “I’m an easygoing artist,” he explained. “I talk about my life, I talk about frustrations I have, I talk about real-life problems, I talk about enjoying, I talk about clubbing. I rap about basically anything.”
He points to his Tupac tattoo — “Thug Life,” across his hand — as an acknowledgment of where his fighting spirit comes from. The phrase, popularized by Tupac Shakur, was never intended as a glorification of crime, but as a reflection of what he described as “The Hate U Give Little Infants F***s Everybody” — the idea that the conditions imposed on young people by society are ultimately returned to it. “I was watching this man fight with the system because his people were suffering,” Mohraz said. “He was my idol.”
However, despite his easygoing nature, Mohraz has faced difficulties in his stance. His public support for Israel during the conflict has complicated his position within the UK drill scene, where views on the Middle East are often sharply divided and loudly held.
“Many UK rappers unfollowed me because I publicly supported Israel,” he said, without apparent bitterness. “I even went to the protests and said: ‘I have good Muslim friends; this is not an issue against Islam.’ But you take it however you want. If you want to be radical about it, you’re going to be. Israel is our good ally – the only good allies in this war were Israel and America, and I publicly supported that. I’m not regretting anything.”
Online, typically, the accusations have been more direct. He described being called an Israeli rapper, a Zionist, a Mossad agent – the familiar vocabulary of a politicized digital space. His response is telling. Rather than engaging, he leans into humor. “When they say something, I just go with it, and I start singing something Israeli. I’m still waiting for my NIS 7,000 from Mossad – I’ve done all this work, and I haven’t got paid.”
What is more interesting is his insistence on separating public disagreement from personal interaction. “I always put politics aside when I meet people in public. Because we live in a multicultural city, when all of this is finished, we have to be able to sit down and have a laugh about it. So I don’t take it personally. My strategy is: first, I say maybe he or she doesn’t know better. And second, I give love. That’s how I free myself from any noise or unnecessary conflict.”
The Israeli response to 021kid music
The responses from Israelis, on the other hand, were something Mohraz appreciated. Messages from Israeli listeners, families telling him the track plays in shelters while Iranian missiles are falling, or seeing videos of young Israeli children dancing to his songs, have led to an even deeper appreciation of Israelis.
“The love from the Israeli people was crazy,” he stated. “That ‘Lion and Sun’ is on repeat, or we’re listening to it in shelters – I’m receiving all sorts of messages. The love has been absolutely crazy.” It is one factor that helped drive ‘Lion Sun’ to No. 1 on Israel’s Viral Chart on Apple Music.
If the UK drill scene has been divided, Iran’s protest movement has, in some respects, moved in the opposite direction. One of the more noticeable features of demonstrations in recent months in the Iranian diaspora has been the visible alignment between Iranian and Israeli supporters. Rarely is an Iranian rally abroad documented without a photo of an Israeli flag in the crowd.
For Mohraz, there is more to this than just symbolism. “One of the things I loved about this revolution in 2026 was that we made the ancient bond – between Iranians and Israelis – stronger,” he told the Post. “I got to know so many good Israeli friends. And we were waving our flags without any fear, courageously, next to each other. If we step back and put aside all the politics and these discussions, we’ve made our bond stronger. That’s the beauty of it. That’s one of the good things in this chaos that we can appreciate.”
Te end point is clear in Mohraz’s mind. It is Iran. “The short-term future is for my people to have Internet,” he explained. “That’s everything. Then they can communicate.
“Long term – in a free Iran under the Iran Prosperity Project of Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi, I want to have concerts,” he said with hope for the future. “I want to tour around all the cities. Tehran is beautiful. We have four seasons, we have nature, and we have parties going on. It’s not what they show in the media. So the goal is: Iran to become free, and I can work and progress in my own country, and have concerts there, alongside my people.”
There is also the broader mission, the one that ties back to his bilingual approach and his insistence on bridging cultures. That of lifting Iran’s cultural profile in the world, ensuring it is seen not only through the lens of geopolitics but through its people, its creativity, and its culture. “I want to put Iran on a map,” he said simply. “And connect it to the world.”
021kid doesn’t fit neatly into one box, and Mohraz isn’t trying to put himself in one. The music is a mix of two worlds coming together, and the point is connection. Connections across languages and cultures and borders, or political actors sworn to each other’s destruction. If that comes with backlash or misunderstanding, that’s part of it, too.
But as he continues to make music in London and move around the UK drill scene, he has never forgotten where he came from – 021.