Lowen: “I want to explore the edges of discomfort in what we do”

Metal bands are often stopped by airport security thanks to their trusty bullet belts. Nina Saeidi gets pulled aside because she’s hauling suitcases full of ancient axes and ornate swords.

Weaponry has long been a fascination for the enchanting Lowen vocalist. The older the better. Instruments handed down over centuries, sometimes even millennia, their bloodstained memories connect us with forgotten ancestors. Integral in both violent revolution and ceremonial pageantry, they have shaped the sands of time.

Also, for Nina, a woman who’s dabbled in martial arts her whole adult life, from MMA to Muay Thai, capoeira to jiu-jitsu, knife-training to archery, they’re just badass.

“Before our last big tour, Shem [Lucas, Lowen guitarist and Nina’s partner] and I travelled to Turkey to collect as many antique arms as we could,” she laughs, assembling a small arsenal for K!’s benefit. “Coming back, the guards were pretty freaked out as my bag was literally full of knives. It was definitely a ‘checked baggage’ situation. I nearly bought this full-size, medieval Persian axe, but it was too big to fit in.

“I have a whole box of beautiful antique daggers with engravings and mother-of-pearl inlays at home,” she continues. “We’ll often go to see friends where we can drink tea and practice with Scythian bows. I love using weapons to highlight our music. Plus, they’re so much fun – having them onstage makes me feel like a low-rent Alice Cooper!”

Middle Eastern weaponry represents a compelling intersection between beauty and violence. Deployed in hotter climes where heavy armour was impractical, and born from non-feudal societies where gemstones and precious metals were abundantly available, curved scimitars and heavyweight tabars could be decorated with all manner of treasure. Differing attitudes to death meant there was no shame in such ostentation, or adorning weapons with deeper meaning than your average broadsword or battleaxe.

Selecting her weapon of choice, Nina would pick the Indian katar, a nasty three-bladed lever-action push dagger.

“They’re so beautiful, but also incredibly brutal,” she explains. “You’d feel kind of like Wolverine, punching and stabbing at the same time, but the wound would completely mess someone up. We want our music to have that same combination of beauty and brutality. Heaviness can be beautiful. And there is beauty to be found in all kinds of ‘ugly’ things.

“I’ve recently realised that the songs we’ve written contain a lot of female rage. I don’t express that by screaming or moving around very much during our performance. Just standing there holding a weapon or looking at it can be even more scary. There’s nothing more threatening than someone who’s angry but in control!”

The first time Nina travelled to Turkey, she was just seven years old. Born in the UK to parents in exile from the Iranian revolution in the late-’70s, she had never met many of her family. Visiting the town of Bodrum on the Aegean coast – still a haven with clear beaches and turquoise water, unlike the crowded tourist trap she returned to last year – the opportunity to spend time and speak with her grandmother, uncles and cousins awoke something in Nina, as did experiencing culture, feeling the warmth and tasting rich flavours far closer to those of her ancestral homeland.

“I used to be so ashamed of being Iranian,” she flashes back. “Growing up, when I first brought the person I was at home to school or other social gatherings, I didn’t realise that I was at odds with cultural norms and the status quo. When I did, I would feel ashamed. I would worry that I was misunderstanding the people around me, or that I was being misunderstood.

“I remember going to a mall on a school trip when I was 11 years old, where we all had £10 to spend on something for ourselves,” Nina continues. “I felt like I needed to buy something that proved I was English, so I bought a Playboy purse, thinking that would somehow help me to integrate better with the culture around me. Going to Turkey was my first experience with anything non-Western. It was a huge deal. I was told to behave differently, speak differently, be more formal. My grandma passed away a few months later, and it was the only time I met her.”

That trip also awakened a connection in Nina as well.

“I remember going out on a pedalo over this coral reef, with fish coming up to the shore, eating fresher food than I’d ever had before,” she recalls. “My Iranian family had never tried Nutella, and we bonded over a jar that my dad had brought. Then I remember going back to the UK, stepping out of King’s Cross station, truly smelling the pollution for the first time, and realising how different these two worlds are.”

Ultimately, coming to terms with being trapped between that old world and the new defined the artist Nina would become. Identity and individuality are to be cherished, not suppressed.

“I’ve still never been to Iran,” she sighs. “If I turned up there, chances are I would be arrested at the airport and killed. But nowadays, I’m compensating for all the years I didn’t appreciate what I had: huge family gatherings and beautiful, elaborate gifts. If I’m in the UK, I’m wearing clothes and jewellery and eating food sent by family back home. And I’m mixing it with band shirts and things I’ve bought on the high street.

“That combination of cultures is a beautiful thing. At the same time, when I return to the Middle East, I do feel more connected to the land and what’s around me.”

Nina doesn’t see herself as a “particularly interesting” individual. Caught up, as so many of us are, in a childlike self-perspective, she says everything about her character feels like an extension of the awkward, nerdy kid she once was.

Old fascinations still simmer: dinosaurs and history, insects and the natural world, alien cultures and faraway lands. Equally, though, she is a constantly evolving personality, reacting to the shifting environment around her.

“Who you are can change from minute to minute and day to day,” she ponders. “Every cell in my mind and body has regenerated since I wrote Lowen’s first album [2018’s underrated A Crypt In The Stars]. When I look back at social media posts from 10 years ago, I invariably cringe at the way I expressed myself back then. I’ll probably do the same looking back at what I say today in another decade’s time.

“I guess that’s just the human condition. I’m not great at being social. I’m not very good at keeping up friendships. What I am good at is being someone particularly interested in pulling at all the threads around me, following them, and finding out where they’re going to take me.”

If art is about capturing individual moments in time, last year’s 5/5-rated breakthrough Do Not Go To War With The Demons Of Mazandaran is a snapshot of individuals discovering the confidence and dexterity to wield a whole lifetime of influence.

Narratively, Nina was familiar with the tale of Div-e Sepid, chieftain of the Demons Of Mazandaran in the same way that British children know the tales of King Arthur and Camelot. But, wielding her 1,000-page translation of Persian epic The Shahnameh, she stresses that there was an opportunity to delve deeper than ever into old myths.

More personally, the record’s interrogations of fate and death reflect Nina’s own internal ruminations on loss of family members in territories where she will never be able to visit, frustration at never having resided somewhere where she could blend into the crowd and grief for the countless other realities – past, present and future – in which she will never be able to exist.

Even academically, having branched from her Eighteenth-Century Studies course at London’s King’s College to study esotericism and alchemy, boldly accessing London’s grand Freemasons’ Hall to read 400-year-old handwritten notes on the excavations at Stonehenge, there remained so much of the unknown to explore.

“When I realised that alchemy came from the east – it’s an Arabic word – I was so intrigued,” Nina enthuses. “Through that I got into psycards and the Tarot. I don’t think I’m a witch. I don’t think I’m magical. But I do believe in what [Alejandro] Jodorowsky called ‘psychomagic’. Magic is simply science we don’t yet understand. Art is the intersection where we combine those things into something interesting. In the same way that I view Iranian and Persian history in the context of the Mesopotamian era and even earlier civilisations, I love to drill down to the roots of things and work my way up!”

True to that, having sown their seeds, Lowen are beginning to rapidly branch out. Although initially taken aback by the feverish reaction to DNGTWWTDOM, expecting “maybe 1,000 monthly listeners” rather than the 30,000-plus currently on Spotify, they have embraced every opportunity.

A first-ever European tour in support of Zakk Wylde’s Zakk Sabbath offered hard lessons, with the band “only realising you could change your rider after three weeks of eating instant noodles and string cheese…” It also came with exhilarating adventure.

“We celebrated some Iranian New Year traditions with those guys,” says Nina, “including a fire-jumping ceremony known as Chaharshanbe Suri, using a lighter at midnight after a show in Germany.”

Slots at Download Festival, ArcTanGent and in support of cult U.S. goth-metallers Unto Others will continue that momentum. And exposure to more and more different fans has emboldened Lowen to continue embracing their darkness and peculiarity wherever their winding path leads next.

“I want to be more unsettling and uncomfortable,” Nina leaves off, tantalisingly. “I want to explore the edges of discomfort in what we do. Partly, that’s about challenging people who find us uncomfortable – either culturally, or in the fact that I’m not the stereotypical frontperson in a metal band.

“More so, it’s about pushing my own boundaries,” she adds. “We want to force ourselves to do the next album as much justice as we have the last one. We want to travel further and develop the visual elements of our live show without detracting from the music.”

And within herself, Nina’s always looking to sharpen the blade…

“I’m talking with a climber about whether they might be able to dangle me off the edge of a mountain for a video, which is literally beyond the edge of discomfort.”

She laughs.

“Basically, I don’t feel like I’m doing enough unless I’m terrified to the point of shitting myself as part of it!”

Lowen play Download on June 11, support Unto Others from June 24, and appear at ArcTanGent on August 14. This feature originally appeared in the summer 2025 issue of Kerrang!.

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• Lowen: “It’s illegal to play metal in Iran. It’s illegal for women to sing. So this is defiance, it’s rebellion”