We met in the heart of East London. I suggested Bank; it’s not easy to pick someone out among the neoclassical façades of the City, where nearly every building is a bank and every entrance looks almost identical. It sounded simple in texts, but turned into half an hour of wrong turns, multiple “wait, which exit?” moments, and a near-comical GPS meltdown. When I finally spotted a guitar slung over her back, there was no mistaking it—this was Neusha.
Coffees in hand, we stepped out from the corporate labyrinth. The classical stone columns, grand archways, and echoing courtyards seemed to whisper of wealth, power, and hidden stories—an appropriate backdrop for an artist whose craft is all about the hidden stories embedded in lyric and voice.
We spent the next hour tracing the maze-like walkways, the sun flickering between the Brutalist architecture of the Barbican Estate. I’d been listening to her recent releases earlier that morning, still unsure if I wanted to bring a set list of questions or just let the conversation unfold. I decided on the latter.
“How did it all start for you?” I asked, as we finally found the right entrance to the Lakeside Terrace.
“Lyric writing started before actually being able to sing. Because of my family, I met this guy from Utah in a church when my family moved to the UK when I was around five… and he helped me with writing a song — something you’d expect from a five-year-old, nothing crazy. Then I remember that when I turned 11, I was very determined about becoming a writer for sure, and was only thinking if I want to write songs with this skill as well or not. I kind of know how decisive I am and I won’t change my decision once I’ve made it, therefore I was thinking about this career very seriously.”
She remembers piano first, then guitar, then drums, then production. By sixteen, she was writing songs she could finally call her own. University came later—not as a beginning, but as a continuation. At the same time, she became close friends with talented musicians such as Jake, Inti, Antonio and Mo—all from different parts of the world, all musicians and producers.
“We live together now,” she said. “They’re like my brothers. One’s Californian, one’s Swiss-Peruvian, one’s Brazilian. I’m the only one born in the UK. We jam together, make music, eat together. It’s chaos, but it’s creative chaos.”
Her favourite artist? Jeff Buckley, and the track that changed things: Lover, You Should’ve Come Over. At sixteen or so, while it was still beneath popular radar, she found it—and something clicked.
Her approach to music has always been deeply lyrical.
“A good song for me starts with the lyrics. That’s what grabs me first. I see myself as a lyricist before anything else. If the lyrics don’t meet my standards, that song never gets released.”
It’s true—her Spotify bio reads bound by lyricism, not genre. Listening to her, it makes perfect sense. Her melodies feel like they grow out of language, not the other way around.
I asked how she keeps track of all her writing—hundreds of unfinished ideas scattered between notebooks and her notes app.
She unlocked her phone and laughed. “From April 2022 until now, I’ve written down 1011 songs.”
I raised an eyebrow. She grinned, unfazed.
“Some of them are just a line, some a verse, some are full songs with bridges and choruses. I write every day. Since I started this I haven’t stopped. That same day, I also started learning Portuguese.”
It wasn’t random.
“I went through something very tough and I was like, no, there’s no way I can’t do anything. I should do something. It’s like I’ve got this pain and it’s so much that I need to somehow feel it and to express it… if you don’t know how to vocalise your pain, you need to write it down. You have to put it down so you can put it out of your system at some point—and so songwriting, for me, puts it out of my system.”
When I asked how she decides which songs become finished works, she explained a process that’s instinctive yet pragmatic.
“Once I start recording, I finish everything—the instrumentation, the lyrics, the production. I probably have two albums’ worth of material that’s unreleased. The decision about what to put out comes when I reach the mixing and mastering stage. That’s the part where I think, does this connect with me enough to invest in it? Because mixing and mastering isn’t cheap, and I’m independent. So, I only release songs that still hit me emotionally when they’re fully done.”
She continued, explaining more about her process and the preference she has for collaborating with producers over doing everything on her own—even though she can.
“I want this song to be the best possible song that it can be. And if two names are on it or a thousand people are credited, I’ll credit everyone. You’ll see that in my songs—I credit anyone who was in the room while I made it. Being prideful or egotistical this early in a career would be a red flag.”
It’s rare in a 22-year-old artist: the maturity to recognise craft, collaboration and the non-linear climb of artistry.
We started talking about one of her recently released singles, So Lost. [Embed link added at the end]
“Miles, the producer, sent me the backing track literally minutes before I took off on a flight. I downloaded it right before switching to aeroplane mode, and in the next 20 minutes, I wrote the whole song mid-air.”
The song was born in that in-between space—thousands of feet above ground, suspended between thoughts and altitude.
“I knew I needed to end something with someone,” she said. “He was a nice person, but there’s a part of me—my pride, my greed—that wasn’t ready. I wrote it as a kind of love letter, not just to him but to the parts of myself that get in the way.”
I asked her about one particular line—“Don’t want this to work.”
“That’s at the end of the chorus,” she explained. “It’s me talking to him, saying you can hold me once more, but that doesn’t mean I’ll stay. I’m a free soul. And as much as I wish this could work, there’s a part of me that needs to admit that it doesn’t want to. I wish he could’ve been the one to end things, but it had to be me.”
It was so honest it didn’t need drama—just truth, in plain sight.
By now, the Barbican’s sun had turned from gold to copper. We found ourselves next to a film crew setting up a red carpet, which somehow made our little cigarette break feel cinematic—except neither of us had a lighter.
What followed was five solid minutes of scanning passersby to guess who looked most likely to smoke. “That old couple, maybe?” I suggested. She nodded.
Eventually, it was the elderly couple who saved the day.
Later, we crossed to the other side of the terrace and sat again. She offered to play me something—an unreleased track she’d be performing that night at her show in West London. She pulled out her classical guitar; its tone was soft and warm, a perfect companion to her voice.
The song flowed in both Portuguese and Farsi, and even without understanding both languages, you could feel every syllable. It was like the sound of belonging and distance colliding—an emotional texture that you don’t translate; you just absorb.
When I asked what studying music at university had really given her, she didn’t hesitate. “Confidence,” she said straight away. “Confidence is about sixty percent of all of the music.” She explained that she didn’t necessarily learn general production there—mostly studio production — and aside from marketing and coursework, not much else stuck. But the same year she left university, everything began to change. One day, one of her friends had his boss over at their house, and in the middle of a conversation he turned to her and asked, “Do you want to be our sound engineer?” She asked how much the pay was; he told her, and she said yes. He simply replied, “Okay, starting in two weeks.” Two weeks—that’s all the time she had to learn a job she knew nothing about.
She began volunteering at Boiler Room Guildford every day, for free, determined to learn as much as she could before that first day on the job. Sometimes she’d come home at three in the morning, drained but sharper each time. Then came The Egg—a venue in North Central London—where she started freelancing and learning production properly on the job. “Because all my housemates are producers, it would’ve been so embarrassing to go into a session and not know how to produce,” she said, laughing. “They’d look at you like—really? You don’t know how to mix your own vocals?” So she taught herself everything she could: production, mixing, how to record her own voice. It became a crash course of “produce, produce, produce,” all so she could stand on her own feet.
Still, there’s no ego in the way she talks about it. “I got to a level where I can produce for myself,” she said, “but I’d rather not, because I prefer to work with my friends who are producers. Why should I let my ego take over just so I can say I’m a producer too? I want the best for the song—it’s not for me.”
As the afternoon light slipped, we walked back past the lake, past the terrace. She invited me to her show that night in West London—a fitting full circle: meet, write, see live. A couple of hours later I was there, and one of the songs was the same one she’d played for me earlier that day.
Even though the audience didn’t speak Portuguese or Farsi, they didn’t need to. The emotion carried itself. Every note, every lyric, every moment of pause—it all felt like a continuation of the conversation we’d had that afternoon.
There’s a rare sense of balance in Neusha’s world—part poetry, part precision, part happy accident. She writes in three languages, lives between four cultures, and still finds humour in not having a lighter at a red-carpet event.
Future plans? An album next year: readying songs, readying performances, readying festivals. Not for the sake of hype but for the sake of expression.
Her art isn’t about blending worlds; it’s about letting them coexist. She writes because she must, sings because she can, and carries herself like someone who knows that being lost is sometimes exactly where the music begins.
Walking away from Barbican that evening, I realised—she’s not just finding her sound; she’s shaping her own language for it.
Credits:
Writer – Seper Mardani
Photography – Shakiba Heydari
Special Thanks – Becky Buckley
