Louder AAA
Nina Saeidi can pinpoint the exact moment she knew she wasn’t destined for a normal life. She was 23, sardined between three or four sweaty commuters on a packed 8am Northern Line Tube train in central London, six months into a corporate job she hated. She was wearing the same fatigued expression as just about everyone else around her, staring into the distance as another day of the grind loomed. And then, a man died on her.
“It was so dramatic!” she says now with a nervous chuckle. “It was rush hour, so it was so crammed that when he died, he couldn’t actually hit the floor. He just slumped on my shoulder, pooped his pants, the whole shebang.”
You might be surprised to find that a dude literally dying on her isn’t even the image from that day that has stayed with Nina the most. It was the reaction of everyone immediately after – or rather, the lack of it. “He was dragged off the train and no one said anything,” she adds. “No one made a noise. It was like everyone was dead inside. It was…” She pauses to scan for the right word. “…unceremonious.”
And in that unceremonious moment, something inside Nina snapped. She quit her job that day and never looked back.
“I just remember thinking, ‘You know what? I don’t want to live the rat race.’ And I decided at that point that I was going to be a creator.”
Fast-forward 11 years, and it’s safe to say that Nina made the right decision. Today, we’re chatting over a pot of chāyee in a quiet Iranian cafe on a blustery spring afternoon in North London, and her life could hardly be more different. Dressed in a woolly magenta top-and-trousers combo (“They’re technically pyjamas!”), black New Rocks and a chunky silver cow skull necklace, long dark hair flowing freely over her shoulders, she looks a million miles removed from a corporate stooge.
These days, she works as a jeweller, is a passionate activist and fronts one of this country’s most exciting bands – Lowen, the genre-crossing, culture-meshing riffzillas who have bewitched the underground metal scene. They formed in 2017, but it was 2024’s acclaimed full-length debut, Do Not Go To War With The Demons Of Mazandaran, that put them on the map.
I had to grow up in extreme silence
That album was a tasty serving of slab-thick doom metal, wrapped in Middle Eastern melodies and lyrics coloured with Persian mythology and the turbulent legacy of Iran, a nation whose recent history intertwines with Nina’s own. Her powerful voice and use of the Persian tahrir vocal technique completes a dynamic that sounds unlike anything else in modern metal – quite remarkable for someone who tells us she was once convinced she had no musical abilities whatsoever.
“I’ve always been told I can’t sing!” she laughs. “Even my own family were like, ‘Nina, you can’t sing, what are you doing?’ I still honestly believe this is all some kind of a joke.”
Nina comes across warm, thoughtful and insanely well-read, dropping references to European literature, Middle Eastern geopolitics and ancient history that have Hammer scrambling for Google on the way home. She retains a quiet confidence throughout our chat, permeated only by hilarious moments of self-deprecation when it comes to her own musical talent – understandable, perhaps, given that Nina’s had to fight hard to make music a big part of her life at all.
Nina says that when she was growing up, her father banned music from the house, meaning she and her more artistically inclined mother would have to sneak listens of traditional Iranian folk and a sparse collection of Abba, Little Richard and Creedence Clearwater Revival MiniDiscs when he was away. Nina no longer talks to her father, but she speaks of him more matter-of-factly than with any hint of resentment.
“I wasn’t allowed to make noise,” she recalls. “My mum was the opposite. She was an artist. She wanted me to make noise. But I had to grow up in extreme silence.”
If Nina’s family dynamic is complex, their history is too. Her parents were born in Iran, but fled the country following the 1979 revolution that toppled the reigning monarchy and replaced it with an authoritarian Islamic Republic. Religious autocracy has followed; women’s rights have been eroded, and dissent is met with imprisonment, torture or even execution.
Iran would sound like this mythical, beautiful place, but also this traumatic, terrible place at the same time.
And yet, there is another side of Iran that Nina believes deserves recognition. She was born and raised in London, but her parents ensured she was keenly aware of her roots - for better and worse.
“I remember being really young, and our family would gather every week or two and talk about Iran,” she recalls.
“It would sound like this mythical, beautiful place, but also this traumatic, terrible place at the same time. There’d be stories of driving to the Caspian Sea and eating herbs in the mountains or having barbecues on the beach, but then there’d also be stories of my mum living in hiding for several years. One of her cousins was one of the first people that was executed during the revolution. Why? For being against the regime.”
Nina says her father’s behaviour had nothing to do with religion, but she eventually found herself rebelling against it nonetheless, marching into an HMV when she was 15 and buying three of the loudest metal records she could find: System Of A Down’s Hypnotize and Mezmerize (“They had the Middle Eastern influence”) and Antichrist, the 2007 album from besuited British extreme metallers Akercocke (“I liked how they looked like these rich Englishmen doing Satanic rituals. That was sexy”).
Those LPs forged a love of heavy metal that has only strengthened over time, and has come to define the last few years of her story. She met guitarist Shem Lucas at an Akercocke show in London in 2017, and the two decided to work on a project together. By 2018, the project had a name, Lowen – a riff on the Germanic word for lion – and an EP.
A handful of gigs followed over the next few years, but it was in the aftermath of the release of Do Not Go To War… in October 2024 that things accelerated. By the end of 2025, Lowen had played Europe for the first time, debuted at hallmark UK prog metal festival ArcTanGent and toured with Zakk Wylde’s Zakk Sabbath. It was a 12-month period that left Nina’s head spinning.
“It was really surreal,” she says now, eyes widening. “I’ve not had a moment to really sit down and process it, because it’s been so fast. It’s just felt like floating on a cloud most of the time.”
There’s another layer to Lowen’s explosion in popularity: Nina has found herself in the strange position of being metal’s most prominent voice for the British Iranian diaspora. On February 28, the US and Israel launched an attack on Iran that sparked a hugely controversial war in the Middle East, ongoing at time of writing.
On the first day of attacks, Iran’s despotic Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was killed. It provoked scenes of celebration among many Iranian communities, but there was also widespread anxiety over what could come next, and despair at the civilian casualties caught in the middle.
Not one of these warring governments is innocent
After some soul-searching, Nina decided to release a public statement regarding the conflict on behalf of Lowen, using her platform to call for unity and throw her support behind the right for the Iranian people to determine their future.
“Not one of these warring governments is innocent,” she wrote. “There is no justification in violence and no one wins in war.”
“My instinct when it all happened was that I didn’t want to say anything,” she tells us now. “I just wanted to hide. I wanted to be grieving alone. But I also felt like it was really important to speak. I owed it to other Iranians to say something, even if they don’t agree with me.”
There may have been hesitation to speak up, but activism runs in Nina’s blood. Her aunt, the writer and political activist Nasrin Parvaz, was jailed and tortured in Iran for eight years before fleeing the country to the UK, and was a huge influence on Nina growing up. In March, the progressive activism group Led By Donkeys projected a video of Nasrin onto the Houses Of Parliament, in which she read a letter to Prime Minister Keir Starmer imploring him to keep the UK out of the war with Iran. It’s a huge point of pride for Nina.
“She was very big in how I grew up and who I became,” she explains. “I’ve been editing her work since I was 12 years old, and she’s an amazing person. Seeing her on Parliament was just wonderful. It was a moment where she really got to have her voice be heard.”
It was a moment of strength in a difficult time. As we speak, it’s the tail end of Nowruz, the Iranian New Year, a 3,000 year-old tradition that celebrates the arrival of spring. The cafe we’re in has a small Haft Seen table set up near the entrance, adorned with seven items all beginning with the Persian letter S, which represents hope and good fortune for the year ahead, the number seven considered sacred in Persian culture.
I would love Lowen to be a space that people can feel free and safe in
Nina Saeidi, Lowen
Traditionally, this would be a time where Nina would be reaching out to her extended family in Iran, catching up and exchanging goodwill messages. That is not currently possible. Since the conflict began, Iran’s government have initiated a country-wide internet blackout, cutting its people off from the rest of the world. Nina hasn’t heard from those family members for weeks now.
“It’s huge,” she sighs, looking down and running her fingers around the rim of her chāyee glass. “I don’t know anyone [from the British-Iranian community] that’s not affected. I already know people who’ve lost family members. And then having to be ‘normal’, write an album, be online, all this Western world stuff at the same time. It’s a very strange time to be making art and just existing.”
And yet, Nina is existing and is still finding space to create, albeit at a slower pace than before. Lowen will play Download festival for the first time in June – another milestone – and a new album is on the way, though any timeline for its release has been muddied by the war. The band recently wiped all their socials save for Nina’s public statement and cancelled plans to release a new single (“now is not the time to be taking up space with that kind of thing”).
Instead, she’s going to take her time, create in the pockets that open up between the grief, and make sure Lowen can forge the right kind of legacy for the band and their fans. Nina may well be the first British-Iranian figurehead in the metal scene, but she refuses to be the last.
“I would love Lowen to be a space that people can feel free and safe in,” she says, smiling. “I think metal is in a really beautiful, diverse place, but I want more people like me here. I want someone else to come in and be better than me, feel like they can keep climbing those steps and be able to reach higher. I’m very privileged to be here, but I want someone else to be more privileged than me. I want to prepare that ground.”
Do Not Go To War With The Demons Of Mazandaran is out now via Church Road. Lowen play Download Festival on June 13.
