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NXDIA

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Cairo-born, Manchester-raised songwriter working in scrappy guitar-pop, with a bratty vocal delivery and hooks that sit close to the mic.

NXDIA, born Nadia Ahmed in Cairo on 15 June 2000, grew up in Heliopolis before the family moved to Manchester when NXDIA was eight. The songs draw on both places: guitar-pop that stays rough at the edges, built on a handful of chords, sung in a half-spoken sneer with the vocal pushed right against the microphone.

At home a father's AC/DC records met a mother's Umm Kulthum, and by eleven NXDIA was being taken to Free Palestine protests, all of it feeding songs about identity that began appearing by age nine. NXDIA has cited My Chemical Romance, Fall Out Boy, Pink, Hole and the Smashing Pumpkins as early listening.

In Manchester, NXDIA took up African drumming at a community centre in Hulme and began posting songs to YouTube and Instagram. At sixteen, a two-week Levi Music Project course taught by the band Everything Everything gave NXDIA a first grounding in production, and a TikTok following grew from 2020 onward.

The 2024 single She Likes a Boy, drawn from old diary pages about a teenage crush, reached number 74 on the UK Singles Sales Chart and was received as a queer anthem, one of several songs where NXDIA writes openly about queerness and about growing up between Egypt and Britain.

An EP, In the Flesh, arrived in 2023, followed in June 2025 by the debut album I Promise No One's Watching, which passed 100 million streams on Spotify within two months of release.

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