Through big hooks and brazen lyrics, Dead Tooth’s sound has a welcome discordance. The group, fronted by Zach James, churns out dystopian post punk that you might hear at a posthumous dinner party where Ian Curtis and Herman Hesse are swilling whiskey and cracking jokes.
As DIIV’s lead guitar aficionado Andrew Bailey splays counter melodies with the swagger of Bernard Sumner and Tony Iommi, James as a front man shouts and moves like a hybrid of Nick Cave and Guy Piciotto, creeping and shaking, bent with a raw frenetic energy. Bailey and James feed off each others madness, making for one of the best stage shows in NYC.
In 2015, Zach James began donning the suit of the Silver Spaceman, a bedroom folk superhero persona that lifted him from his Brooklyn bedroom and into the terrifying world of artful soul-bearing. As James’ first project at the helm—an early stint in Haybaby (Tiny Engines) gave him the confidence—it started slowly, but quickly gained momentum. He got to know Andrew Bailey on smoke breaks during long diner shifts. Bailey was modest about his main gig as the guitarist for shoegazers DIIV—so much so that James wasn’t aware of his new friend’s resume until he saw him in front of a sold-out crowd at the Music Hall of Williamsburg.
When Bailey and James joined forces, the project began to take on a different shape. It snarled and simmered around darker textures, miles away from earlier folk-rock threads into murkier trenches. Inspired by his own identity rather than a fictional one, James looked to his darkened smile and rechristened the project Dead Tooth. Since the rebrand, the group has been relatively prolific, recording their debut EP in 2018 and later collaborating with Jamal VanSluytman, member of the pioneering afropunk outfit No Surrender. Most of this steam has billowed up during the pandemic, with singles releasing at a steady clip.
Allow James to describe the new “Blind” video in his own words; “I’ve always been mesmerized by Butoh and interpretive dance so when starting to conceptualize the video I would put Butoh performances on youtube, mute them and let Blind play over it. It looked really cool so I knew I wanted something like it to be the video. I’ve been a huge fan of Nola’s dancing ever since I saw her perform years ago. There was some kind of cathartic crossover through our respective forms of expression and we became good friends. Watching her perform was like seeing a really good band play.
It needed to be one shot. Anything can happen and for the viewer it’s so cool to get to the end and realize they made it there the whole way without messing up(or messing up and rolling with it). I think we took 4 complete takes ’till we got one we liked and then just decided to do another one for good measure which actually ended up being the one the final cut.
