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
Blossoms caught up with NME to discuss competing with The Beatles and Johnny Marr for this week’s Number One album. With ‘Songs From The Wedding Cake’ in the running, the band also explained why making things themselves remains such an important part of their work as AI becomes more common.
The Stockport group put out their sixth album last Friday, October 2. By the midweek update, it was sitting at Number Two, between The Beatles’ expanded edition of ‘Rubber Soul’ and Johnny Marr’s latest solo album, ‘The Age Of Everything’.
“It’s mad, to be honest,” singer Tom Ogden said to NME about the chart race. “Liverpool on one side, Manchester on the other and Stockport in the middle. If you’d told us this 10 years ago, when we were releasing our debut, I wouldn’t have believed you. But I mean, we’re in good company aren’t we?”
Discussing the stories behind the album, Ogden described ‘Songs From The Wedding Cake’ as “about being married and all the everyday stuff that comes with it”. He married Katie Donovan, the sister of Blossoms drummer Joe, in 2021. Married life has since given him a new appreciation for what he describes as “the extraordinary ordinary”.
“Saying the wrong thing in an argument, losing your wife’s no claims bonus, crying at the Kardashians, it’s all in there,” he explained. “The album is named after Stockport Town Hall, which everyone round where we live calls the Wedding Cake, and it’s where I got married, so it couldn’t be much closer to home.
“The last album [‘Gary’, 2024] had a song about a stolen fibreglass gorilla, which everyone loved, and that gave us the confidence to bring the same playfulness to this one, just with more personal subject matter this time.”
Alongside tracks that came out of writing sessions with Declan McKenna in a hot tub, the album reflects the band’s desire to stay involved in every part of the creative process.
“It started with the recording,” Ogden explained. “We made the album with Shawn Lee, playing live straight to tape, and once you’ve done it that way you can’t really go and fake everything else. We sat down as a band and picked the colour palette, and everything visual followed from that. We had body scans taken of ourselves and cake toppers of the five of us 3D printed, put them on a real cake and photographed it. I’ve directed and edited the videos, and the sets are all built by hand, no green screen. For the pop-up shop on launch weekend, a local artist hand-painted the album cover for the sign outside.
“It’s more work, but you end up with a world that’s yours, and I think people can tell when a band’s had its hands on everything.”
With AI tools and digital effects becoming increasingly widespread, that approach feels particularly relevant. For Blossoms, though, the motivation is simple: “the fun is in the making”.
“Tape doesn’t let you cheat and neither does a real cake,” Ogden said. “If a set’s a bit wonky, it’s because one of us or our mates built it. I think the more stuff gets generated, the more people want to know a human being actually did it. We’ve been in this band together for over 10 years, five lads from Stockport, and that isn’t something you can ‘prompt’.”
Maya Jama also appeared in the video for the album’s first single, ‘Meet Me In Love’. Her appearance came shortly before the UK launch of Celebrity Traitors, where she took on the role of a traitor alongside a cast that included Richard E Grant and James Acaster.
“She was brilliant,” Ogden recalled of working with Jama. “We’d met her at the MTV EMAs in Manchester a couple of years ago, so we took a chance and sent her a DM …and she said yes. Next thing she’s in a theatre in Cheadle miming my vocals while a load of people dressed as me serenade her. She got the idea straight away and was a proper laugh about it.”
The conversation then turned to whether he thought Jama could take home the win on Celebrity Traitors.
Ogden joked: “As for Traitors, she spent a whole day pretending to sing my song and I almost believed her, so I’d say she’s got every chance.”
Fans can listen to ‘Songs From The Wedding Cake’ now. In November, Blossoms head out on a UK arena tour with The Royston Club. Tickets and further details are available here.
Before the tour begins, the group is also scheduled to appear on SNL UK on Saturday, October 24.
