The first time I heard of DEADLETTER was back in 2022, when I reluctantly took a spare ticket to go to their gig in Nottingham. I knew nothing about them, no idea what genre, sound, or age they were. And it’s safe to say, I was pleasantly surprised. Their infectious energy in a small dark room was something I couldn’t ignore and couldn’t help but enjoy. Coming from the depths of Yorkshire, England and establishing themselves in the bars of London, this band have polished their chaotic punk sound, carried by prolific songwriting. And now they are ready to take it around the world.
Before I knew it, DEADLETTER were in all of my playlists and firmly on my radar. So, when the opportunity arose to sit down and speak with their frontman Zac Lawrence, ahead of their debut album release, I had to say yes! “Hysterical Strength” is set to come out on the 13th of September as their first complete body of work. After a stellar release of singles from the band, fans -including myself – have been dying for a complete record. Now, finally, the wait is over. While the band were making a stop in Berlin for one of their many European shows, I caught up with lead singer Zac via Zoom, to discuss everything from London life to the inspiration behind their debut album.
I wanted to ask straight away about why you chose that specific picture for the cover of “Hysterical Strength”. Why Ian McDonald’s photograph and why did it resonate with you guys as a band?
We went on this big old back and forth, and only a few weeks or maybe a few months prior to that decision-making process, we’d done a shoot with Ian McDonald, which we’d arranged to do in the North, in a small village called Gromont. There was then this potential to actually use his photos from his archive, which he’d taken over the years. And there was just a resounding yes for that, because we already had so much respect for him, both as a person and as an artist. It just seemed like a no-brainer. So, we started going through some of the old photos that he’d collected over the years… it was quite quickly decided, that the part of the blast furnace, which appears on the front of the album, would be the cover. I mean, I remember when I first looked at it, I couldn’t believe that it was a real photo, you know. It looks like something that either you generate digitally or you’d paint. It gave me this kind of Stanley Kubrick feel. It almost looks like part of the set from “2001 A Space Odyssey”. I think we’ve ended up with a really beautiful series of art, which kind of stands quite nicely alongside some of the themes that are throughout the album, with sort of brutality and harshness being one of them.
I always thought it looked like something that had fallen out of the sky. It looked very space-like. Before this album, you’ve released almost an album’s worth of music. But you decided to start afresh with your debut album. It could have been really easy to use some songs that you already know are crowd-pleasers, but you haven’t. Why is that? Did you just want a fresh slate?
Well, I think that certainly came into it. But, I don’t think we get too caught up in sort of, nostalgia trips, if you like. Maybe there hasn’t been enough time elapsed, since us beginning, up to this part where it’s been even deemed nostalgia. But, I feel like the rate at which we churn out songs and music in general, the amount that we write together… there wasn’t any necessity for us to kind of fall back on something else. I think secondly, I personally, and I know that everyone else agrees with this sentiment, as a consumer over the years, felt as though it’s more exciting, to be granted a little bit of the upcoming album. That excitement building and looking through the track names on the album and thinking, ‘what’s that going to be?’. I suppose if I can put myself in the position of a fan, that would excite me.
I think it’s always interesting when a second album comes out and you can hear exactly where it left off. Are there any songs that you’re the most proud of on the album?
Well, I mean, the body of work as a whole I am proud of. But if I were to hone in, I think “Mother” is one that, when I initially wrote that set of lyrics I was very excited about. And then when the music came together, I was even more excited by it. And then when we did the music video for it, and you had all three of those elements coming together – the lyrical theme, the sonic elements of it and the sort of visual side of things – as a piece of art as a whole, I’m really proud of that.
I saw a comment on one of your music videos, where they described your music as ‘poetry set to music rather than a song’. I kind of think that sums up your songwriting well. What influenced you to write for this album – was there any sort of poetry or books or other songwriters that you took from?
I think that as soon as I started taking my sort of love of literature a bit more seriously, my songwriting was impacted by that admiration. I read a lot of Russian literature – not in Russian – but I think perhaps that. Some of it is late 19th century, so there’s a lot of language which might be deemed as sometimes pretentious. But I also see a lot of beauty in language like that. Aside from the kind of thematic elements, I would say how I write, I mean… I don’t really know. I actually find it to be a really hard question to answer, because I’ve never sort of sat down with myself and thought: ‘Who do I want to sound like? Which song, which lyricist do I want to represent?’ It seems to just happen naturally.
You’ve not wanted to be pigeonholed and you’ve done a good job at that. You can hear so many different influences in your music. But, is there any music that has influenced you, that people would be surprised to know about? I don’t like the term ‘guilty pleasures’…
It’s funny because I had a question about guilty pleasures earlier today, and I said you shouldn’t have any. So, if we’re talking about that word, I mean, if you’re talking about surprising… people always find it quite surprising, how many sort of singer-songwriters I listen to. I don’t know why. I assume it’s because of the music we make. I fucking love ABBA, but then everyone loves ABBA. I mean, I know that the song “Fit for Work”… the beat in that, we deliberately were kind of taking the piss out of “One Dance” by Drake.
You are a live band first and foremost. That is how you’ve come up, from doing so many gigs. Why was it so important to you to establish yourselves in that kind of circuit? When now streams and online following feel so huge?
I don’t know, again, maybe from my own personal experience when I was sort of 14 and first started going to gigs. Or was taken to them rather – because I didn’t live close enough really to a major city. I think I became aware of the fact, that the difference between listening to someone and seeing them live is quite huge. There’s more of an authentic experience to seeing someone live. And that’s not to say that an album reeks of inauthenticity, because that’s not true. But I don’t know, there’s no ‘take two’s’ live, it’s where your trial and error comes in. That isn’t really something we can bring into a studio environment, because it’s usually such a finite amount of time that we can afford to be in the studio. We haven’t actually had that kind of, you know, three weeks experimenting with the synth noise at that moment.
And also, we enjoy playing live, you know, we enjoy it! I can imagine it must be very difficult to be an artist who doesn’t enjoy that side of things. So, it’s never really felt like a slog, you know? There have been tough moments. There’ve been moments where there’s been the 1am slot at the end of a festival, thinking it would be great and three people have been there. But those moments keep you grounded, and they also remind you, that it doesn’t matter who’s in front of you, they deserve the same show.
I think that’s what’s interesting as well. You’ve established yourselves in the UK scene and the London scene, and now you’re going to places where you’re having to introduce yourselves. So, you’ve gone from playing in packed-out rooms to playing in places where they might not know who you are. How has that been?
Well, it’s strange, you know, because I think that actually it’s probably a little bit easier to get a bigger crowd going. Because there’s more, here’s more of a mass. I have to say, since the beginning of this band, I’ve always liked to get up close and personal with people and sometimes it throws me off, when there’s this fucking two, three-meter space between myself and the audience. If we get to a festival stage now and I can’t get down, I go full fucking diva and request them to build some kind of step, which they willingly do. So, thank you to those stagehands. But, what makes us very fortunate is that as much as there has been a rise, we’ve definitely seen some kind of change, you know, positive change. It’s never been like, ‘fuck that’s changed’, we’ve kind of grown with it.
You said earlier on, that you didn’t live near a major city. How did you find that transition of coming from Yorkshire and moving to London and now being involved in that scene?
It was quite gruelling at first, because first of all we weren’t afforded the luxury of knowing loads of people to get to our shows in the first place. So, we did quite a few horrible sort of ‘pay to play’ gigs, when we first got down. There used to be a few companies, I won’t name them. But they deserve to be fucking named, because what they’re doing is criminal. You would sort of play the show and if you didn’t sell X amount of tickets, you owed them money! It’s fucking completely exploitative. We were given our first opportunity to play The Windmill by Tim Perry, the booker. I suppose that was where everything began to change for us. And this wasn’t even as Deadletter. And then it was sort of just home for a while. There was one summer I think we played there pretty much every Friday for like a two or three month period. There was another venue called The Five Bells in New Cross, which was also quite similar to The Windmill in that respect, where you could just go in pretty much every night of the week and see bands play.
If you knew a band just moving to London, what advice would you give to them? How would you tell them to navigate things? Is there anything that you wish you’d done a bit differently?
I maybe wish I didn’t get so fucked up so quickly. I think, I don’t know, it’s hard to give advice. You’ve kind of got to work it out in your own way. I think you’ve got to play a lot. You’ve got to be willing to do a lot with not a lot of payoff to begin with. I don’t mean literally economically. I mean, in terms of everything, I think you’ve got to put in the hours, you’ve got to be willing to play shows to nobody, and you’ve got to not take it for granted when you’re playing shows to somebody. Um, and also find yourself a day job that you really like. Because you’re going to be doing it for a long time.