INTRODUCING: Zulu
ZULU are a band on a mission. From their music to their message, the Los Angeles five-piece are out to do it their own way and no-one else’s, defiantly rejecting any notion of what should and shouldn’t be expected essentially of a powerviolence band, whilst always in the pursuit of creating a more inclusive and communal space for all. Chatting to frontman and founder Anaiah Lei just a week ahead of the release of their much-anticipated debut full-length A New Tomorrow, the arrival of which by now should have rendered the need to ‘introduce’ ZULU to anyone somewhat redundant, one gets the sense that nothing will stand in their way after this.
Of course, plenty of people will have been on board for a while now. The band have made a ferocious live reputation for themselves over the past couple of years, and the two EPs which precede this record each found a fair and justified share of acclaim in the right circles. They’ve put a lot of eyes on ZULU for this full-length statement, but the band have taken it firmly in stride. “There’s always a bit of pressure when you have some notoriety on you, which I’m grateful for as well,” offers Lei. “I definitely felt it but we pushed through it. I push through all that, at a certain point I’m like, you know what, regardless of whether people are gonna like this or not, I’m going to do it with 100% of my heart in it.”
Without question such dedication has yielded one of the most important hardcore records of recent memory, an album of few sonic boundaries, and even fewer thematic contemporaries. Where many records, including to an extent the band’s previous EPs, speak of the Black experience in America with wholly justified rage, A New Tomorrow moves far beyond that to provide a powerful celebration of Black history, creativity, and triumph over adversity. “The record is about hope,” elaborates Lei. “It’s about love, it’s about the celebration of our life. And I’ve told this to a couple of people by now, but A New Tomorrow is the representation of the new day that we want to see where we get to just live in harmony and love, and hoping that would be sooner than later.”
It’s a sentiment carried through every lyric, every sample, and even every step the band take into different genres on A New Tomorrow, right the way through to the album’s triumphant final lyrics lifted from Bob Marley’s Small Axe. “Triumph is a good word to use,” affirms Lei. “The lyric is referring to society being the big tree that’s daunting over everything, but we’re trying to cut down all the stuff that they’ve put on us. And that’s what Bob Marley was talking about, about people being the small axe that slowly, steadily will cut it down, and we’ll do it. We’ll do it with our music. We’ll do it with our community and our unification, so that’s why I felt very strongly about that being at the end.”
There is nothing shallow about Lei’s words here. Despite the band’s origins as a one-man side project, there has always been a communal aspect to ZULU’s music, and nowhere is it more clear than in the litany of guests and voices that help bring A New Tomorrow to life. “I always try to include other people from my community on these records,” explains Lei. “I feel that’s an important part in community and unity. So that’s very intentional. I wish we could’ve had a million people on these records but unfortunately it’s not as easy to do that. So I try to get who I can, friends that are doing it in their own respective avenues, and include them in this space that we’ve got going on, because this space we’ve got going on is a space for all of us.”
If there is an overarching theme to ZULU’s work, this is it. Even as the hardcore scene seems to grow refreshingly more diverse and inclusive with every passing year, the fact remains that it is still largely white-dominated, and Lei is clearly uninterested in trying to fit into someone else’s world when he and ZULU have created such a beautiful and vibrant one of their own. “There’s a lot of stuff that needs changing [in hardcore], but at this point it’s not even about the change,” he emphasises. “It’s just about building a new space within it that we can exist in. There’s so much stuff that’s just been perpetuated for so long that at this point I’d rather just build my own place in it rather than conform.”
It’s this mindset which makes A New Tomorrow such an inviting prospect, to the point that Lei’s concluding hopes for the record feel like far more of a done deal than anything one might call wishful thinking. “I want people to be insanely geeked on the record and I want people to play it every single day,” he summarises. “And when they can’t listen to it anymore, I want them to take a break and listen to it again and dive into the lyrics. I want people to really feel the music – I know that’s a very typical thing to say, but I genuinely want people to feel it.”
A New Tomorrow is out now via Flatspot Records.
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