Q&A: Enigmatic Duo hyderdaze Channels Years of Friendship Into Electric Debut EP
THERE IS NOTHING MORE SACRED THAN MAKING ART WITH FRIENDS — especially if the friendship is born out of a shared love of all things creative. Composed of two best friends, Sarosh Qadri and Bryan Anthony, hyderdaze is a project years in the making.
The duo met when they were playing in the hardcore punk scene, and while originally in different bands, they instantly connected creatively. They felt no need to rush into collaboration, and this patience allowed them to grow immensely in their own ways. Now reunited, hyperdaze is energized, excited, and filled with inspiration — ready to share their artistic love child with the world.
With different personalities and skill sets, Qadri and Anthony use their friendship as a source of inspiration and utilize each other's differences as motivation for their projects. They push each other from a place of love — love for music and each other. They’re not afraid to challenge each others' ideas, and their songwriting reflects that raw and honest form of collaboration. At the end of the day, no matter what happens while creating a song, these two have each other's best interests in mind, and that trust leads the way to authentic experimentation.
After a busy summer of releases, the duo shared their debut EP, No Life To Live, with the world. With punk influence, evolving synth sounds, and clever songwriting, this EP beautifully encapsulates the energy of these two friends. They’re experimental, lively, and forthright in their opinions. Standout tracks include “Social Suicide,” a synthy introspective track with rage-filled vocals, and “doit2ya,” a punchy electronic track reminiscent of The Chemical Brothers.
Luna sat down with Qadri and Anthony to discuss the process of creating No Life to Live, recent live shows, and the beauty of making music with friends. Continue reading below to learn more about this dynamic duo.
LUNA: How did hyderdaze come into existence? What conversations led to this collaboration?
QADRI: Hyderdaze originally started as a solo project of mine. Bryan and I have been best friends for a long time. We met while playing in the hardcore punk scene — we were playing in different bands, but we would play shows together and he and I became close through that. Then we both took a break from music around the same time. So that's when we started hanging out all the time, probably around 2015 or 2016. Eventually, I started a band in 2019 called Hotel Casino — Bryan was the drummer, and then the pandemic happened and we couldn’t play together as a band. So that's what led me to start making solo music. I had never made music alone before — I was always in a band growing up, but that wasn’t possible during the pandemic, so I released a few songs under the name hyderdaze.
I played a solo show last year, and afterward I realized how much I hated being a solo artist and how lonely I felt being up on stage by myself. I'm just so used to always being in a band and I love the energy of being in a live setting, collaborating with your band — you are just feeding off each other and putting on a good show. So I felt that while performing solo. I also missed that with the songwriting aspect — I love songwriting with other people and bouncing ideas off each other. So I realized that I didn't want to be a solo artist and I wanted to be in a band, and right around that time is when I was starting to produce more electronic, alternative types of sound.
Bryan and I always toyed around with the idea of being in a duo, so I called him and asked him if he would want to come back to music. He and I talked about how he wanted to get back into it too, and how he missed it. So it came together that way. I was sending him all the demos and stuff that I was working on, and he liked the sound. So we thought it would be cool to have a duo of a singer and a drummer.
LUNA: That's a really beautiful story of friendship and collaboration! Did you both study music formally, or are you self-taught?
ANTHONY: I come from a very punk DIY [world] — that's what I grew up listening to. I learned guitar [when I was young]. My mom had a client of hers back in the day who was giving away some stuff, and she brought home this guitar. I had no idea what to do with it, but I was like, “Ooh, this is sick.” I was playing a left-handed guitar while right-handed — I didn't have a clue that the strings were the wrong way. So I started screwing around that way, and then a neighbor’s dad was like, “Yo, I'm gonna go and surprise my kid with drums and guitars,” and he filled his garage with gear. When I saw that drum set I thought, “I want to see what that sounds like.” So every day after school I would come home and stop at my neighbor's house for an hour, just messing around [on the drums]. That’s how I learned — I would just throw on my headphones and try to replicate the things that I listened to, like Blink-182.
QADRI: I am self-taught as well. My dad's side of the family is nothing but musicians for various generations. I was born in Pakistan and then moved to the US when I was two. My grandfather was a famous composer in Pakistan, so it was kind of in my blood. I tried playing guitar when I first started, but it didn't resonate with me. My uncle played the keyboard, so I started playing the keyboard and I picked it up quickly — it just made sense to me. I learn visually, so if it doesn't make sense to me visually, then it doesn't resonate in my brain.
While I was learning how to play music, YouTube was starting to become a thing. So if there was anything that I wanted to learn, I could just go on YouTube. So I learned that way. My dad would help me a little bit here and there, but I was never formally taught. I just had an ear for music. I think with music, that and some basic knowledge is all you need. Sometimes when you get too much into the nitty gritty of music [theory], it tends to take away the soul from the music. I think music is beautiful when it's more playful, more child-like, and more experimental. Even if it's not something that would traditionally work if it sounds good, it sounds good.
ANTHONY: Yeah, adding to that, it’s not that there's anything wrong with being [formally trained], but I feel like if you come from that background of music theory, it's very structured and analytical. So with this [non-structured] way, you have no borders, you have no boundaries, you don't have that confinement of the theory of it. Instead, you're trying different ideas, and that's where — against erosion — all these ideas come from.
LUNA: Congratulations on the past few performances you have done. How do you prepare for a live show? What is it like to take your music outside of the studio?
QADRI: Our first show in Brooklyn was interesting for Bryan and I because we've known each other for so long but we've never played music together before. So we were exploring a new dynamic of our friendship. A lot of the chemistry that we have translates into us playing together, so it felt very natural, even though we had never played together before.
In New York, Bryan has a little space that he rents out and also rehearses in by himself. So when I flew out to New York for the Brooklyn show … we rehearsed in that space a couple of times — we had two days where we rehearsed for a few hours. Bryan runs all the backing tracks and everything off the sample pad, and that essentially controls our entire live show.
ANTHONY: It's a multi-part thing for us. Sarosh and our producer, Austin, send me all the files while I'm in New York, and I have everything on the computer where I bounce it down and level it out to make sure everything sounds good. Then I load it all onto the sample pad, which runs all the live tracks. So it’s a lot of tweaking.
I had never worked with electronic components live. In the past, I was playing punk and post-hardcore bands, so it was just, like, drums and double pedals. So for me, the past six months I have been figuring everything out — learning how to wire and link everything. So that was a really big trial and error period for us, and it's always going to be like that — we're always going to be fine-tuning things.
QADRI: It's really interesting because like Bryan said, we both grew up playing in punk bands, and we were a lot younger back then. So a lot of that was just walking up and performing. Now we're a little bit older, a little bit wiser, and we're exploring a genre that Bryan and I have never really performed before. We are approaching everything with a more mature mindset, which feels cool, because this is probably the best that Bryan or I have ever sounded. I think this is the most mature we've been as musicians or artists.
It's a lot of trial and error that we've done over the past six months, developing the songs and then also developing this live show before debuting. We wanted to make sure that we sounded as best as we possibly could, where in the past we might have been so eager to perform that we would have just gone up and played without having given it too much of a thought. Now we did our homework.
LUNA: Describe your emotions in anticipation of the release of your EP.
QADRI: I feel great about it. I still don’t know if I have been able to disconnect from it emotionally and listen to the project objectively. I probably won't be able to do that for a little bit, because I am still so emotionally tied to the songs since I've spent so much time on them this last year. [This project] was essentially all I was doing [this year]. Producing electronic music was something that I had never done before, so I had to teach myself how to produce over this last year. We tried to dedicate as much time and thought into all of this as we could, while also balancing having day jobs and life. Overall, I feel confident, and I think the EP is great. I love all the songs. I've heard from people who have had an early listen that each song has its personality. Someone described it to me as if the tracks are all siblings.
ANTHONY: To add on, with us being so close to [the EP] and having listened to the songs over and over and over again, we know it like the back of our hands. I still pick it apart sometimes, so I'm excited to get it out there. I’m excited for people to hear it, people outside of our close friends.
LUNA: This summer you released a music video for your song “Social Suicide.” Describe the creative process of making that video.
QADRI: Backstory [on that], I wrote the song about how I was feeling like an outcast at that moment in my life. I felt my opinions were changing, compared to a lot of people that I was around, and sometimes I felt like I wasn't able to express those opinions or chime in on conversations because I had just such a different outlook than other people I was around. So it's written from that perspective, but then it's also written from a perspective of going online and seeing so much false information being passed around — like there's this one side that you have to be on, and it's the right side, and if you're not on that side, then you get canceled, or you get shunned. So it is from a perspective of reality versus virtual reality.
So I presented the idea of doing a music video to my friend Julia, who is a sick model, who paints, writes, and is an all-around creative. I didn't even really have too much of an idea for the music video, but I just kept listening to “Social Suicide” and visualizing her listening to it. She loved the song so much and felt connected and offered to creatively direct it. So she came up with this whole concept of this girl lost in her virtual reality, always being on her phone or just being self-obsessed, and she has no idea what's going on around her. So throughout the video, she is super cut off from the real world and drowned in her virtual world, while Bryan and I perform the song around her. It's almost as if we don't even exist to her, you know, and she can't even see us.
I had my friend CSPR shoot the video. He's an amazing director and brought a whole different perspective to it. He shoots a lot of different stuff, but predominantly rap and pop music, so it was cool for him to bring that perspective to an electronic, alternative band. I think the video came out cool and shows a bit of all of our personalities in there, which is cool.
ANTHONY: In terms of setup, we had discussions weeks prior trying to figure things out and storyboard it all. Then we flew Julia in from Seattle, and we all met with CSPR at our label, Lollipop Records. We took a day there to sit down and lay things out because the following day we did a full shoot. It was a full-blown, 12-hour shoot day, but we knocked it out in one day and we killed it. The ease of the shoot day is a testament to CSPR’s approach and perspective in conjunction with Julia's ideas.
Sarosh and I had our input, and we did our little things here and there. So it was a collective effort and the synergy was just so great. It was so easy and natural to work together. It made me appreciate making something with these friends because I had done music videos in the past that weren’t like this one. It just felt like a family [affair], and obviously the process was long and tedious, but we got it out of the way and had so much fun doing it.
QADRI: It felt like we were hanging out all day. It was Bryan's first time meeting CSPR and Julia, so it was cool because we're all best friends now. Julia has been a part of another visual that we're about to release for another song on the EP. She was at our LA show, and she's become one of our best friends through the process of making that video.
ANTHONY: Sarosh and I always talk about creating this community of friends — we have our goal, and they have their goals, but together we're able to reach these goals a little bit faster and maybe better. We work together, we scratch each other's backs, and we try and help each other when we can. One thing that Sarosh told me in the past is that he was never going to bring somebody in [to our community] that he knows would make me feel uncomfortable. So when he brought in CSPR and Julia, I knew we would all get along and help each other expand our perspectives. Having a community of friends and creatives around you who are willing to help each other out even in times of need is the most important thing. The way our “Social Suicide” turned out is a testament to the power of community.
LUNA: What are you looking forward to over the next few months in terms of your upcoming projects, live events, or other creative endeavors?
QADRI: As we finished mapping out what songs were going to go on the EP, I maybe took a few days off and then I immediately started working on the next thing. I did want to take a break for a little bit, but I just love making music. I think a lot of what I feel is my purpose is tied to making music so if I'm not doing that, then I feel like I'm not living my purpose. So I've just been working on the next stuff. We have like a couple of singles that we're planning on releasing next year. So I am now starting to develop the sound for the next EP or project. We’re focusing on how to progress the sound of No Life to Live.
ANTHONY: Everything has been a long process from where we started to the shows now. So I'm looking forward to the new music — we have these new demos that I think are going to overshadow this EP, even though I love this EP. I am just truly in love with these ideas that we have going. Overall, I appreciate everything that we're doing a lot more because we have always wanted to make music together.
I’m also excited to play shows. I missed playing shows, and these brought back that feeling of, like, “Shit … that's the most fun you can have, being around your friends and playing music.” So live shows will be a big focus for us moving forward.
