Nina Saeidi is wearing a green, gold-encrusted robe and holding an antique knife above her head. After unsheathing the blade, she pokes it into her stomach, then makes a slitting motion across her throat. Although these may seem like the ritual actions of a priestess, Saeidi is actually performing on stage at Bristol festival ArcTanGent last weekend, singing with her metal outfit Lowen in a crammed tent.
“It’s a Turkish Ottoman dagger,” she tells me backstage later that day. “I got it in some very cool, obscure-looking vintage shop in Turkey last year. I’m really interested in historical items from that region – but, because I can’t go to Iran, I have to gather things from around the Silk Road and places like that.”
Saeidi is a Briton of Iranian descent, her parents having fled their home country to seek asylum following the 1979 revolution. She was born in exile and does things every day that would break the law in Iran. It is forbidden for women to sing by themselves in public; in 2015, members of thrash metal band Confess were arrested for blasphemy and propaganda against the state simply because they made anti-establishment music. In the 1980s, the Iranian government kept Saeidi’s aunt in prison for nine years and tortured her due to her socialist activism, before she too escaped to the UK.
“She has horrific PTSD,” the singer says. “She’s basically my second mum. She raised me and she would take me to protests. I kind of got my political acumen from her.”
Through Lowen – a twist on the word “lion”, as the band believe the animal symbolises power in eastern and western cultures – Saeidi expresses her passion for Iranian history and her disdain for the country’s authoritarian regime. On last year’s second album Do Not Go to War With the Demons of Mazandaran (named after a chapter from the epic Persian poem the Shahnameh), she sings in English, Farsi and extinct languages such as Sumerian. She also uses the tahrir vocal technique, a wobbling wail distinct to Iranian classical music.
The first line of the song Najang Bah Divhayeh Mazandaran is “Let this be the death of silence”, announcing the band’s defiant intent. The title of Corruption on Earth comes from the charge Iran gives political prisoners before executing them, and its lyrics address the Woman, Life, Freedom movement: nationwide demonstrations that followed the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, who was allegedly tortured for not adhering to Iran’s strict dress code for women. From the movement’s beginnings in late 2022 through to September 2023, Iranian authorities killed at least 551 protesters.
“I feel guilt for not being there,” Saeidi says when I mention the protests. “I’m in such a privileged position that I can make music here. If I were in Iran, I’d be happy that I’d be with my family, that I’d be able to explore the country, but I would not have the freedoms that I have.”
Since releasing the album last October, Lowen’s powerful themes and labyrinthine sound have made them one of the UK’s hottest metal acts. Metal Hammer put Do Not Go to War … in its top 10 albums of 2024; the band have toured with former Ozzy Osbourne guitarist Zakk Wylde; and this summer, as well as ArcTanGent, they played at Download festival.
But the genre in which Saeidi is a rising star was banned at home when she was young. “My dad was quite tyrannical,” she remembers. “A lot of people assume it’s because of religion, but he just didn’t like noise. If I turned a page too loudly in my book at night, he would come in and scream at me.”
Classic rock and Middle Eastern folk were permitted when Saeidi’s father wasn’t around. Eventually, in an act of protest, she picked up an issue of Kerrang! and bought albums by the two bands that stood out most: Armenian American four-piece System of a Down and UK black/death metal provocateurs Akercocke.
“Both became my favourite band,” she says. “Akercocke are extremely sexual but kind of empowering, in my opinion, for women. As a teenager growing up in an extremely Middle Eastern household, that was crazy shocking – if someone was kissing on TV, the channel would get changed.”
Saeidi met guitarist Shem Lucas at an Akercocke show in London, and they co-founded Lowen in 2017. The band will play their biggest headline concert to date at Camden’s Underworld in December, and they’re in the middle of writing their second album, which will reference Israel’s bombing of Iran in June.
“Our new music contains samples of those bombings,” Saeidi reveals. “I do not agree with anything that Israel has done. It’s bad to bomb Iran. None of those governments are good – neither is ours. We need to start separating criticism of a government from criticism of a people or an ethnicity or a religion, because it’s not the same thing.”
However, Saeidi doesn’t want Lowen’s music to be a call to action, hoping instead to create a communal space for listeners. “People need to spend more time with each other,” she believes, arguing that third spaces – those outside work and home – “are being cut away, and I think that is causing so much division. Through division, people are getting away with murder, essentially – with genocide.”
