ON THE RISE
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With his new track, “Dreaming,” Jeryko’s melody lifts your head to the clouds while the beat keeps your feet tapping on solid ground.
When told this, he said, “Exactly! That’s the point — you’ve got to bring both your head and your feet into it if you want to achieve your dreams.”
The mix of slow acoustic guitar and background strings opens the way. Jeryko softens his baritone voice as he starts with the chorus:
Dreaming heads up in the clouds
I’m just dreaming they tell me to come down
All they know is what they tell themselves
But I’m still dreaming in the clouds
About 40 seconds in, the music stops, Jeryko sings the hook:
Not coming down
And the beat kicks in, emphasizing the point. “Not coming down.”
“It’s about being someone who’s a dreamer, who believes in big things, for myself and for the people that I love,” he said.
“I think the people that have an impact are the dreamers. We have these visions of what we can accomplish, and the people accomplishing them — the craziest people do it. You know?”
Jeryko describes his music as “soulful indie pop.” The indie and the pop are definitely there. The soulful is not “soulful” in the usual way of somebody singing in some breathy, ethereal voice. It is soul — Jeryko’s — set to a rocking beat, solid melody and catchy lyrics.
His music comes from what he describes as three points of a triangle. One he calls alt-rock, inspired by artists such as The Fray, Coldplay, Kings of Leon, Fall Out Boy. Another he calls “alt neo-soul” (Mac Miller, Frank Ocean, Chance the Rapper, Tash Sultana, Jon Bellion).
The third is “ancient melodies” from his Neo-Hasidic Jewish faith and heritage.
Whatever he calls it, however he describes it, he uses the three ingredients to create music, which often has a beauty that words can’t really comprehend, being in the nature of dreams.
“When you dream,” he said, “it’s not just about dreaming, it’s about bringing it into action, bringing it into the world, and that takes grit. That takes hard work, a lot of work.”
He relates it to his music this way: “True dreaming is like this mix of ethereal, high-level, warm, fuzzy sounds that make you think you’re looking out a window on a road trip, and then we bring it back down to earth with the beats.”
“Dreaming” is the second single he has put out that will be part of a long-term project to create an album. The first was “Walk Away,” released earlier this year.
Going forward, the plan is to drop a single a month until the as-yet unnamed album takes final shape.
“‘Dreaming,’” he said, the song, “encapsulates a lot of what the album is about. It’s about being someone who’s a dreamer, who believes in big things for myself and for the people I love.”
A lot of talk about dreams, dreamers and dreaming is based on the perception of “dream” as something that, however sweet, will never be real. Jeryko — a name from the Bible, an ancient Jew who prayed and saw himself breaking down walls, making the unattainable real — connects earth and sky.
Perhaps that’s the role the soul plays.
“Part of it is that we have to have good intentions with our dreams, too — pure hearts and the desire to bring light into the world, to bring people joy, because there’s also a lot of dreamers that are trying to do the opposite.”
This soul thing, this dreaming, this business of good intentions — it sounds nice, but if you’re the kind that doesn’t give a rip about this stuff, you can ignore it and still experience the beauty of the music and the enjoyment in listening to his songs.
He is, after all, in the business of music, which he has been putting out since 2017. His songs have attracted millions of streams across various platforms.
Still, he says that his music career “started out pretty slow.”
“It was kind of a side thing for me. I would just put out one or two songs a year.”
He was always playing, first in places like yoga studios, then his first solo show in the Mercury Lounge. A fan base started growing. He put out an EP in 2020, the six-track Human, and things started picking up.
Since, he has played to sold-out audiences in big New York venues, Gramercy Theater and Music Hall of Williamsburg.
“The next stop is Webster Hall, hopefully.”
For him personally, he said, creating songs is like prayer. He does not put that on other people.
“I use music in my own life for my own spiritual pursuits to connect to something bigger. I like to say that, like at a show, my goal is to help people connect to each other, to connect to themselves and to something bigger, to whatever version of God that is for you.”
If, for some people, the something bigger is, say, “only” music, then it is still well worth connecting to Jeryko on all platforms for new music, videos, and social posts.
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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.
