ON THE RISE
LOS ANGELES, Calif. — The pop-punk, rap-rock duo Levi Zadoff and Dead Hendrix have worked hard to encapsulate the months of COVID-19 in an album called “Dead Summer,” and they haven’t even met in person yet.
That will change at the end of September when they meet up and perform live at ArtBarLA in Venice Beach, California on Sept. 30, but don’t expect any big emotional outburst over meeting in person for the first time from either artist.
“On an emotional level I don’t think it’s going to be much different,” Dead Hendrix said. “We’re already close as hell. Of course we talk every day on social media and on call so we’re already good friends.”
Their five-track EP, “Dead Summer” rolled out on all platforms on June 3 and has already been viewed 50,000 times.
Zadoff said the EP is an emotional ode to the losses both suffered from the pandemic and associated mental toll it took on friends and loved ones, and they hope listening to the album will help others who can relate to the pain suffered by many.
“So me and Hendrix experienced a lot of similar things,” Zadoff said. “He had a very close friend die from Fentanyl and I had a friend die from a Fentanyl overdose and a friend die from suicide, both people I knew for a very long time growing up in San Francisco. We know we are not the only individuals that went through something like this. This was a global thing, so many people were dying whether it was from the pandemic and the disease itself or from the mental health issues that came from all the isolation and being all cooped up. The inspiration was if we can relate to this, other people can and it’ll be therapy to them. It’s therapeutic to us but it's also therapeutic to others.”
And the name of the album relates directly to the message in the music.
“The summer was dead, nothing was going on, we were locked in our houses, not a lot of social stuff was going on,” Hendrix said. “There were people dying from COVID, from drug abuse, from suicide. Emotionally, I think a lot of us were pretty dead inside. It was just that, that’s what was going on in our lives when we wrote the project and that’s what came out.”
Based in Los Angeles, Zadoff uses lyrical versatility and life experiences to create music on track to set the mainstream music industry on fire. He is a firm believer in freedom of artistry and the idea that music is one of the best communication tools.
Dead Hendrix is a punk/rap artist from Centretown' CT' in Ottawa, Canada. He is 20 years old and has been writing songs since his single-digit years. He covers true-to-life topics such as drug abuse, heartbreak, insecurities, and trauma in his music while being as unique and original as possible.
The duo met during the pandemic when Zadoff found a clip of Hendrix performing on Snapchat and was moved by the music.
“I had to say ‘what’s up,’ because the song he was previewing was so good,” Zadoff said. “I heard him previewing the song on Sound Cloud and I swiped up and I wrote him to say how fucking objectively good that song was and how much I wanted to collaborate with him.”
Zadoff, from Los Angeles, sent Hendrix, who lives in Ottawa, Canada, a song idea he had and asked if he'd be interested in working together on it.
“As an artist you get a lot of that, you get a lot of people reaching out, so at first I took it with a grain of salt,” Hendrix said. “But after I heard what he sent me and I looked more into him and I was like this would be perfect to collab. And then it started with we were just going to collab on one song but as our friendship grew and we realized how good we were at collabing it grew from one song to a whole project.”
Both said collaborating from a distance over the internet has been significantly different from collaborating with other artists in person.
“I don’t think one or the other is worse or better,” Hendrix said. “I have some friends I collaborate with here in my city and we go to the studio and it’s more in person. I think me and Levi clicked and this has been one of the easiest collaborations I’ve been involved with. It just flows naturally.”
“100 percent, I think Hendi really summarized it really well,” Zadoff added. “I think that collaborating over the Internet has been obviously different but in some ways it streamlined the process of the song creation.”
Both artists said they really don’t have a favorite of the five songs, but they said “Love Games,” serves as the essence of “Dead Summer.”
“It gives off that energy we were trying to encapsulate,” Zadoff said. “‘Teenage Dirtbag’ in my opinion it’s an absolute classic. I really think that song has a lot of mainstream potential, depending on the listener, I’d point people to one of those or the other if they had the chance to listen to only one track.”
Make sure to stay connected to Levi Zadoff and Dead Hendrix on all platforms for new music, videos, and social posts.
Stream Dead Summer
Levi Zadoff Website
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Dead Hendrix Soundcloud
Dead Hendrix Instagram
ON THE RISE
As Belle & Sebastian share their buoyant 2026 Scotland World Cup anthem ‘It Only Takes One Lion’, frontman Stuart Murdoch has spoken to NME about capturing the feeling back home and his hopes for the team since childhood.
Released today (Tuesday June 2), the Scottish indie heroes’ bid for their nation’s tournament anthem was written after the team’s surprise 4-2 qualifying win against Denmark.
“I felt like we were watching history in the moment, like the hand of God from the old National Lottery adverts was pointing at us,” Murdoch told NME about that game-changing victory. “It was meant to be. Scotland aren’t a terrific team and Denmark are better, but it just felt that day that Scotland were destined to win. Three out of the four goals were things of beauty.”
Produced by and co-written with Pete Ferguson and premiered at the band’s recent London Royal Albert Hall show as part of the anniversary tour for their classic first two albums ‘Tigermilk’ and ‘If You’re Feeling Sinister’, the soaring song is intrinsically Belle & Sebastian as it morphs from a hymn to a an orchestral disco jam as Murdoch sings of a nation’s hopes and his own boyhood dreams.
NME spoke to Murdoch from the band’s North American tour, where we found him in a graveyard in Texas. “I was just looking for a park because Austin is a pretty scary place downtown now, so I’ve ended up in the Texas Cemetery,” he shared via Zoom.
Was there anyone famous buried there?
“I was looking around and I found the founder of Austin City Limits, which is pretty cool as that’s where we’re playing tonight. I’m looking at one now and it just says, ‘Martin: he loved the law’. Then underneath it says, ‘Billie Louise: she loved the lawyer’.”
We joke that there’s the opening to a Belle & Sebastian song if there ever there was one. “It’s great! It’s given me inspiration.”
For now, read the rest of interview with Murdoch below as he tells us about Scotland’s chances, 30 years of hurt, if fans will be singing it at the top of their lungs in Canada, the US and Mexico this summer, and what’s next for the band.
NME: Hello Stuart. Here we are with ‘It Only Takes One Lion’ Who needs three?
Stuart Murdoch: “Who needs three? Good question. I wouldn’t know!”
What’s the mood been like in Scotland since you qualified?
“It’s funny. I’ve noticed this everywhere: with the World Cup there’s a mixture of cynicism and anticipation. When the actual tournament starts, everyone will get excited about it. Because of FIFA, the peace prize, the ticket prices, people seem quite down about it. I found that in Mexico. They were quite fed up with the general hype about it. I’m in the States just now and you shouldn’t believe all the hype: people are people. The States are just as ‘great’ as ever. We love coming here, we love the cities. The general sense of North American optimism will make for a good tournament.”
“With Scotland though, people will definitely be excited about it. You have to understand, it’s been 30 years since Scotland qualified so I think everybody and their dog has written a song for the team.”
How do you meet the challenge of penning a World Cup anthem, when there have been so many legendary bangers and absolutely shite duds?
“I never planned it. I woke up with a tune in my head and a feeling. That’s the way it should always be for songs. I couldn’t control myself and it was quite straight-forward. I wrote this initial bit about how I felt about the current World Cup team and the qualifying game. It was more introspective.
“When it starts off with, ‘The days are dark and long…’, it’s just my general feeling about football. I’ve been going to see my own team quite a lot recently. It’s my little anthem for how I feel about football and following Scotland for the last 50 years, just the ups and downs. It’s quite a heartfelt thing. When I was eight or nine, the Scottish team meant so much to me, it the thing I was most invested in. There’s a line in there about how I used to memorise the whole squad before ‘78 and 82.”
Tell us about lyric: “This is Scotland, where everyone knows you start with nothing… where you can join an army for peace”…
“My wife made the video for it and she said, ‘I’m not sure I like that line about everyone starting with nothing’. Our first game is against Haiti and they really have nothing. Their country is pretty poor and they’re going through hard times. It was almost a throwaway line and I’m not sure what I meant by it, but in a footballing sense every game starts with nothing. Even if it’s against Brazil, you’ve always got a chance!
“The army refers to The Tartan Army, which has really been quite a remarkable institution for the past 30 years. We changed from drunken buffoons that used to wreck things to this excellent supporting brigade.”
It’s not your standard football sing-along. Can you see it being sung in the terraces?
“I’m not sure, I didn’t cynically design it for that. Many people have said to me in the past, ‘None of your songs have a chorus, you need to write one’. ‘This is Scotland’ is a chorus! They things need to happen organically. I’m sure the fans will still be singing ‘Yes sir, I can boogie’ for years to come.”
What do you actually think of Scotland’s chances right now?
“With the last Euros, they maybe got stage fright or didn’t have that tournament experience. I think Andy Robertson [captain] will be telling them, ‘We really need to produce our best stuff’. If they do and we see them actually playing football, then I don’t really care about the results that much. I just want to see Scotland exceeding our expectations of them. That Denmark game was so crazy that everything after just feels like a bonus.”
If miracles do happen and Scotland make it to the final, how will you celebrate? A free gig in Glasgow?
“Of course, yes! Free everything. If we even got close, I think the whole country would shut down for a year and the GDP would drop. We’d go into a massive recession but no one would care.
“We were playing a gig in Mexico City and I told the crowd, ‘It’s you and us, Mexico and Scotland in the final’. Mexico have never really got close either. I told them it would be five goals a piece, even after everyone takes a penalty and we have to share the trophy. I would settle for that.”
You released two albums in quick succession with 2022’s ‘A Bit of Previous’, 2023’s ‘Late Developers’ and then your debut novel Nobody’s Empire in 2024. You’ve been busy! Is there any progress on new material?
“We went through a period where we recorded a lot and we said, ‘Let’s not record for a while and give ourselves a couple of cycles off’. We’re doing these 30th anniversary shows so we’re just going to lean on the back catalogue and cruise for a while. We’re doing a year on and a year off so everyone can focus on different things.
We’re not looking at new Belles stuff for a while. I’m meant to be developing Nobody’s Empire into a film, so that’s my next task. It’s a long way off from being made but I’m going to write the script for that.”
Scotland’s first World Cup tournament match is against Haiti on Sunday June 14, before they go on to play Morocco on Friday June 19 and Brazil on Wednesday June 24.
The band’s ‘Tigermilk’ and ‘If You’re Feeling Sinister’ anniversary tour continues throughout the summer, performing the iconic albums in full during across the UK, Europe, North America, Mexico, Australia, Singapore and Japan. Visit here for tickets and more information.
