niina starts every set by thinking about the crowd: who’s listening, whether they’re dancing, and what she wants them to feel. Then she builds a journey, packs in more routes than she needs, and lets the room decide where it all goes. Her aim is somewhere between euphoria and sass, a dancefloor that feels swept away and a little bit untouchable.
niina is a producer, singer, DJ and creative director from Britain, based in Lisbon. Her sound draws on UK underground club culture, moving between breakbeats, bass, alternative pop and electronic music.
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OPEN ON YOUTUBE ↗She released her debut EP 2 high 2 cry in 2021 and her debut album honestly, does this smell off to you? in 2024. Her work has drawn support from BBC Radio 1, CLASH, Wonderland and Mixmag, alongside performances at fabric, Printworks and Lost Village.
Asked to describe her work in three words, niina went for “playful, euphoric, messy”. It’s a fair summary of a set that refuses to stay in one lane.
Her preparation is built around feeling rather than genre. She pulls together all sorts of music, groups tracks by energy, and puts together a selection that could take the set in several directions. On the night, she reads the room and follows it. She likes taking people somewhere a little unexpected, and leaves space to see where they end up.
The selection process is half the fun. She loves rediscovering music from years ago and hearing it in a completely new context, and finding unexpected connections between tracks that shouldn’t work together but do. She’s constantly buying new music too, so preparing a set is the perfect excuse to go digging and deep dive into different musical worlds. It’s the element of surprise she loves most, never quite knowing what she’ll find or how it will all come together.
On the floor, the feeling she’s chasing is a blend of the dreamy and the cheeky. She loves big, uplifting moments, but when things get a bit too ethereal she’ll drop in something to shake it up, and vice versa. “I love that feeling of being completely swept away by the music, like you’re floating somewhere above yourself, but at the same time feeling like a bad b*tch haha,” she says. “I think the sweet spot is somewhere between the two.”
That spirit runs through niinaland, the immersive universe she’s building out of surreal visuals, eccentric characters and unapologetic individuality. niina’s Love Club brings it to the dancefloor through club nights led by women.
Her latest single “woozy” is out on 6 November, ahead of her second album, welcome to niinaland, on 4 December 2026.
Asked about her deadliest weapon in a set, she points to her ear for lyrics.
“Not a very DJ answer,” she admits, but she loves lyrics and she loves rhythm, so she’s a sucker for rhythmic, almost percussive vocals. She weaves her own music in alongside tracks with the same energy, and those moments become anchor points in the journey, a thread tying together sounds and genres that might otherwise seem completely unrelated.
