Imagine, if you can, that the land where you came from was forbidden to you. The place where all your ancestors lived, right down to the first person who bore your family name, bolted shut. If you dared to enter, you’d face imprisonment — or more likely death. Your life a permanent state of exile.
This is the condition that Nina Saeidi has spent her entire life trying to reckon with. Due to the Islamic Republic of Iran’s strict laws, Saeidi is forced to live almost 4,000 miles away from her land of provenance. It is now highly illegal for Saeidi — a metal singer born and raised in the U.K., who now fronts the up-and-coming band Lowen — to visit the land where her parents were born, and her extended family still resides.
“I’ve always been dying to go there, to meet all these people that I’ll never get to meet,” she says. “It’s totally heartbreaking.”
Displaced and dispossessed, she transmutes the yearning for her homeland into sorrowful, crushing sounds with Lowen, laying down tahrir (traditional Iranian vocals) over complex progressive metal filled with propulsive rhythms and alternately heavy, heady and doomy guitars.
Speaking with Revolver a few months before the release of Lowen’s second album, Do Not Go to War With the Demons of Mazandaran, Saeidi’s state of limbo feels doubled. She’s in that strange purgatorial space between album wrap and album release.
“We’ve no idea what to expect, because it’s a bit unusual, isn’t it,” she says, demurely at first. Then, more accurately: “There’s really nothing like it.” Saeidi is entirely right: Do Not Go to War With the Demons of Mazandaran is a rich and unique concept album that merges ancient Persian tales and sounds with modern metal. The word “uncategorizable” gets bandied around a lot these days, especially in this age of boundary-pushing metal. But it’s the only one — at least in Western expression — that can accurately convey how singular this album is.
Sammy Urwin and Justine Jones of U.K. metalcore group Employed to Serve, who keenly signed Lowen to their label Church Road Records last year, irreverently refer to it as “world prog.” How else to describe it? It’s the total distillation of an ancient world untouched by Western music, the soul song of someone far away from their padlocked home.
Saeidi is apprehensive about how the world will react to the album. She’s nervous, she says, because “there’s more of me in it.” When asked to define who Nina Saeidi is, exactly, she replies: “That’s a good question, because I still don’t know the answer to that.”
Lowen answers that question for her, even if obliquely and highly conceptually. Listen to Saeidi’s vocals — the notes that travel far and strong as a river breaking through a valley. They contain every part of the singer: her past, her fight, her shame, her heartache, her displacement, her confusion, her longing.
It was 45 years ago that Saeidi’s parents fled Iran during the revolution and settled indefinitely in England. They birthed their daughter into the world on the other side of exile, raising her on Iranian culture in a sleepy southern English village. While she was fluent in Farsi, Saeidi didn’t speak a word of English until she was old enough to go to school. On her first day, she discovered she was one of only two non-white people there. At just six years old, she received her first racial slur. “I was bullied very badly for having, you know, ‘weird’ food in my lunchbox,” she recalls. “I would eat olives and hummus way before they became a middle-class food.”
The racism she experienced taught her to be wary of her own culture. As a child and preteen, she felt embarrassed whenever her family spoke Farsi around her. “I was trying to hide it, and I was very good at blending in because I had so many years of shame,” she says. “It wasn’t until I was a teenager and discovered metal that [I found] a place for me to truly express myself.”
In metal, she discovered an artform that dabbled in the daring scales of her homeland and gave voice to outsiders. She became an avid reader of metal magazines and found inclusivity to be a common refrain among the bands who were interviewed. This music was for everyone, especially those who felt like they didn’t belong. Saeidi’s discovery of metal also caused her to fall in love with her heritage.
Andy Ford
When she was younger, Saeidi’s parents would invite friends over on summer evenings to sit around a fire and talk about their home country. As the stars hung brightly in the sky, she listened intently to their tales about the mountains of Kurdistan and Iran, the fresh spring water that ran through their homes and the fish swimming in the clear streams. These stories evoked otherworldly visions for Saeidi, and the far-off land became a mythical place in her imagination.
She saw a very faint mirage of that fantasy when she listened to metal. There were vague Eastern influences across bands like System of a Down and Conquer Divide — but still, something was missing. “I always had this feeling that I would love to hear the sound of what I grew up with, of traditional Iranian music, which is so heavy, so sad, so sorrowful at times,” she says. “I always knew it would work well in the heavy-metal context.”
She manifested that vision after meeting Shem Lucas, her romantic partner and Lowen’s guitarist, at the front row of an Akercocke show in London. When they first began practicing together, Saeidi found that she could, almost inherently, perform the highly complicated tahrir vocals, a yodeling technique used in Persian classic music. She simply opened her mouth and out it came: undulating vocals, miraculous control, the sound of her homeland and heritage. “It’s the sound of what’s trapped inside of me. It’s the connection I’m seeking with my family, with Iran,” she says. “It’s so much more than just music.”
She celebrates her culture’s history — and ongoing struggles — on Do Not Go to War With the Demons of Mazandaran. The record’s themes were mined from one of the fables in Shahnameh, the Persian “Book of Kings,” which tells the story of a royal corrupted by an agent of evil, who, through his greed and folly, extends his borders into a magical, untouched land. It’s a story, both specific and universal, that applies as much to Iran circa 500 B.C. as it does to today’s world.
“When I wrote [the album], I had in mind the Islamic regime in Iran: the way they oppress people, their greed and the way they’ve handled stuff in the country,” she says. “It’s why I’m here and not where I should be: with my family and the people I love. Instead, I’m out here in this place where I’ve never felt accepted, where I’ve never felt like I fit in.”
The songs “Corruption on Earth” and “Waging War Against God” are written about the tyrannical ways in which women are treated under the regime, as well as the continuing fight for their rights under the Woman, Life, Freedom movement.
“It’s so interesting that 5,000 years ago we were relating to these stories the same way we are relating to them now — they still hold so much commonality with people who lived completely different lives,” says Saeidi. “And I think metal is such a great place to explore unity and difference, because people are united through those differences. I find it so much easier to connect with people when I acknowledge that.”
Lowen is so much more than a band. It’s an ancestral pilgrimage, a metaverse of ancient spaces Saeidi has dreamed up. It’s one step closer to home.