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
Levi Zadoff Instagram
Dead Hendrix Soundcloud
Dead Hendrix Instagram
ON THE RISE
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NETHERLANDS — August 26, 2026 — Brook Lynn is stepping into a new chapter with “Love Your Enemy,” an atmospheric alternative pop song that turns an intensely personal battle with anxiety into a message of self-acceptance. Written after her America’s Got Talent auditions, the song captures the internal conflict of facing the person who can be hardest to silence: yourself.
Built around cinematic production and emotionally restrained vocals, “Love Your Enemy” explores the disconnect between appearing fine in public and confronting difficult thoughts in private. The song’s central message is reflected in its chorus, where Brook Lynn sings about being “my own worst company” before arriving at its most hopeful realization: “They say, ‘Love your enemy,’ / So I’m learning how to love me.”
For Brook Lynn, that “enemy” is anxiety. Rather than presenting it as something that simply disappears, the song examines what it means to live with those thoughts while refusing to let them dictate what comes next.
“I always want to give a hopeful message in every song,” Brook Lynn explains. “I always first want to explain what is happening in your head and what you feel, and then, at the end, give a message that you can get out of this, and that anxiety doesn’t have to hold you back from all the things you want to achieve in your life.”
That message became especially significant when Brook Lynn made the decision to perform “Love Your Enemy” on America’s Got Talent. Known by many viewers for her stripped-back cover performances, she recognized that performing an original song on one of television’s biggest stages carried a different kind of risk. But she also knew she could not continue forward without showing audiences the artist behind the covers.
“I just thought it was really important to also show the world that I’m not just a cover singer,” she says. “I do want people to know that I write songs and I want to be an artist and put that out there.”
Brook Lynn performed “Love Your Enemy” during the America’s Got Talent quarterfinals, bringing the song’s story of anxiety and self-doubt directly to a massive live audience. Her journey on the show ended there, but the response made one thing clear: listeners wanted to hear more. Fans connected not only with her voice, but with the honesty behind the performance and the willingness to speak openly about emotions many people struggle to acknowledge themselves.
“I do want to be that person with my music as well for other people,” Brook Lynn says, describing her desire to write about real experiences and feelings. “I always want to be really real with everyone, like talk about deeper stuff, not surface level.”
“Love Your Enemy” arrives as Brook Lynn looks ahead to Tales From The Woods, an upcoming EP intended to introduce listeners to a broader picture of who she is as an artist. With only two original songs currently released, she says she is excited to share more music and continue developing the sound and emotional world introduced through “Love Your Enemy.”
The song is not a conclusion to Brook Lynn’s story. It is the beginning of a more open one—one where anxiety can be acknowledged without being allowed to take control, and where the feelings people are often afraid to say out loud can finally have a voice.
Listen to “Love Your Enemy,” which received promotional support from Starlight PR.
Brook Lynn creates music that feels intimate yet powerful, cinematic yet emotionally exposed. Blending atmospheric alternative pop with minimalist visual storytelling, her work explores vulnerability, isolation, emotional tension and human connection through a distinctly modern lens.
Raised in Wilp, a small town in the Netherlands, Brook Lynn grew up surrounded by silence, nature and isolation. Music became a private emotional outlet and a way to process feelings that were difficult to explain out loud. What began through stripped-back online performances evolved into a growing global audience drawn to her honesty and emotional depth.
For Brook Lynn, music is never just about being heard. It is about being understood.
thisisbrooklynn.com
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