“If it makes me move, I can then translate that to the crowd to make people move and to enjoy it. My idea would be that everybody walks out feeling like 10 men! So they feel like they can do this, like they have life and a better version of themselves.”
LZ7, an electronic dance music band from Manchester has joined Jason Derulo on his The Last Dance World Tour. Previously having also joined Derulo on his 2Sides World Tour, LZ7 are back as the support act to breathe inspiration, verve and energy back into your life.
The band is formed by Lindz West, the frontman and lead singer; Louis Read (Saint Louis), a DJ and producer, successful in collaborations “with Fred V & Grafix, Danny Byrd, and Hybrid Minds. Alongside his artist work, he is an established producer for Sky Sports, Top Gear, advertising campaigns, and film scores.”; Leonn Mead, a powerful and energetic drummer; and Lee Matthews, a multi-instrumentalist, crucial in shaping the live sound of LZ7 on stage.
Lindz West was originally a member of The Tribe (formerly known as World Wide Message Tribe), a former Manchester-based electronic dance band. The Tribe was active from 1991 until 2004 with the aim of spreading the gospel to young people in Manchester through music. With a successful critical acclaim and three GMA Dove Awards, The Tribe’s website archive mentions: “Although the name and line up have changed and despite world wide popularity, the vision remains the same; to communicate the gospel to young people in Greater Manchester.” The message stays relevant, because although the band has changed, the vision of spreading a faith in something bigger than us remains.
After the disbandment of The Tribe, Lindz proceeded to create the band we now know as LZ7. Since the band’s formation, they’ve been performing at festivals and high schools, working with the youth around the UK. The LZ7 website specifies that the band works with “70 + high schools/ year” and has thus far come “face to face with over 750,000+ young people”.
Today, LZ7 have 6 successful albums in their discography and a track record of smashing the charts: tracks such as Legends featuring Silento reached the no. 4 spot on the Commercial Pop Chart, no. 6 on Upfront Club Chart and no. 12 on the Urban Chart. Aftershow reached no. 5 on the Official UK Dance Chart and more recently, These Are Better Days from 2019 reached the no. 20 on the UK Dance Album Chart. Just a few weeks ago, LZ7 released three new tracks all featuring amazing faith-based artists, further merging a wide variety of genres into an LZ7 sound. The releases include Perfect Duet with Gracie (Herbert), Rewind with Solomon Olds and Risk It All with Steven Malcolm.
Meshing the world of British garage and electronic music with messages of faith, Lindz kindly agreed to have this interview with me, and answer some questions about the band’s work but also what this recent adventure with Jason Derulo has been like. In a very uplifting, motivational and enthusiastic conversation, Lindz covers topics like mental health (trigger warning of sensitive topics), reasons to stay alive and the ways in which he hopes to encourage people to “squeeze the juice” out of life.
Read the interview below to find out what LZ7 is all about and what this collaboration on tour with Derulo has meant for them as a band.
You just released 3 new tracks, Perfect Duet with Gracie, Rewind with Solomon Olds and Risk it All with Steven Malcolm. What inspired these latest tracks?
Rewind with Solomon, he’s a guy we’ve done lots of production with. Like the last album, or every time there’s a song we’re working on, we love jumping in with him, because he’s full of energy and you can hear it in the vocals. We were sat in the studio, and thinking about what was our first love and about going back to that first authentic thing we fell in love with in music. Both Louis and I are kind of skater kids from back in the day, and it was all DNB. We’d go to DNB raves, it’d be on in the background when skating, I’d have it in my head. It’s that driving kind of passion and I just thought ‘let’s just have a go at doing something that we love and is authentically us!’. That was the first initial jump off into that world. We worked the song within an hour, sent it over to the States. Within two days, Solomon sent back his vocals like, ‘this is banging!’. That Rewind kickstarted the new sound of the direction we were taking.
Then Steven Malcolm, he’s featured on another song from a couple of years ago called Monster. He’s got that sort of Midwest, swaggy, American vibe. I was like, ‘how about you jump on like a UK beat, a garage beat?’. And he totally got that, I was like, this really works in the UK, DNB and garage sit hand in hand. So, I started with this ‘sometimes you got to let go, sometimes you got to risk it all’, which is about making a decision to reach your full potential, live life to the max. [Steven] then started with all the Americanisms, like ‘three point twists’. I started getting inspired, so we pulled together Risk It All with a guy called Jimmy James. He’s a producer in the UK and we’ve worked with him loads on our stuff, and we just said that we need to make sure that this song is absolutely kicking. And it really does kick! He’s come over on features, flown over to one of our festivals. That was just all over the summer.
Then Perfect Duet came out with a girl called Gracie Herbert who is an amazing singer-songwriter in her own right, but she’s a daughter of a mate. We just asked her if she wants to jump in and get this song done. She came in with the ‘na na na’s, and I thought that could be a DNB beat so all four of us threw ideas at the wall to see what sticks. It was all in the process of writing a new album without actually knowing that we were going to do this tour and the tour dates fell right at the exact time that we are now going to release the single. It was the perfect marriage of exposure to people that have never heard our stuff, doing a new track with Gracie and a feature. She’s been to three of the events, now. It goes off, it’s amazing and I love it.
What does your creative process look like when you’re building a track from scratch?
We were building a Spotify playlist that Louis and I would add lots of bits to, and say ‘I love that sound, I love that drop, listen to this lyric here’. We kind of call them reference tracks. We started that last summer, and started compiling it, it’s like a good 100 songs long now. We kind of dip in, pick what sound we love and make it LZ7. We turn that stuff off and just ask what does that look like for us? Then we’ll pick a topic. So, like I said, Risk It All is about making a decision, Rewind is about going back to a moment when you really make a connection with something bigger than yourself and it’s wanting to go back in time to find that moment. For some people it’s nostalgic, and it sounds like a 90s DNB piece, so it could be going back to when you were a kid. I remember making a choice at about 16, that I needed to switch on and get my GCSEs, and that was a real moment that I had. It’s rewinding to those moments.
Coupling that with our faith side, the foundation of us and rewinding to a moment when we saw something bigger than ourselves, when we realised that things don’t happen by accident, that there’s something working this out for us. That’s when we focused on the topic. With Perfect Duet, Gracie was like, ‘well, I’m church-y, and one of the things that’s valuable in my life is my relationship with God and it feels like a duet, like we’re walking side by side in life, that I’ve got someone with me for the journey’. So, she wanted to write about that, and I thought that was perfect! We stuck to the topic rather than disappearing off. It feels like it kind of creates something, but there’s no sort of ‘hold-bar’. It’s just throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks and running with the best ideas, so Duet was written in a day, Risk It All and Rewind in a couple of hours as well.
It’s when you find that flow, and I always find that when I really feel a song, I’ll suddenly stand up in the studio and realise that it’s made me move. If it makes me move, I can then translate that to the crowd to make people move and to enjoy it.
Is there an emotion you haven’t tackled yet but would love to?
I did an interview on the weekend, and the interviewer interestingly said that he felt music should always be ‘anti-something’ or angsty and fighting something. In my head, I really want to write about what we’re for, not against. We’re for life. For example, when we go into a high school, the head teacher might come up and say that there’s a real trend around suicide at the moment, people are threatening each other on Snapchat to do whatever kind of stuff, and they ask if we could focus on that? I say, absolutely, so a lot of our message is to never give up. Keep breathing, tomorrow holds the answers to today’s problems.
A lot of young people will come in and hand in suicide notes and self-harm blades saying that they’ll never do this anymore and they want to live their life to the fullest. It’s almost like some of us gravitate to being the best version that we can be.
But again, with another topic along the side of what’s going on at the moment, what’s current, what are we feeling. I’ve written a couple of songs about my kids, about the toughest moment in life where I couldn’t solve a problem or figure it out. I had to get it down and write it because it could relate to someone in a certain way. I love writing about passion and about vibe and celebrating everything good in life. There’s different things that you can focus on and sometimes there might be something around the bend that will take us a completely different way. I can’t really pinpoint a specific thing I want to write about right now.
There’s one we’re in the middle of writing called Amen. That’s a word meaning something is done, finished, as in no more guilt, no more fear, no more lies. When you say ‘amen’ at the end of a prayer, it’s over, let’s move on. I’m really passionate about that song, maybe that might be a banger for the future
You also collaborate with artists from a wide range of genres, just recently with Steven Malcom, a hip-hop artist. What does the collaboration process look like when you have to agree so many elements and genres together with other people?
There’s a lot of back and forth. Some of them might take two weeks, some two hours. But there’s a lot of back and forth between the US and the UK between the sounds we like, for example with Steven Malcom. We bring our opinion, in a way just saying ‘well, the UK garage scene kind of feels like this, and that drop works there’, and then Malcom says, ‘can I get my American trap, hip-hop producer to maybe tweak this?’. That’s full of knowing that the end result is going to be amazing. We don’t end up in disputes, we are open handed about what they think is best for the song. We come to an agreement and both labels look at each other to do this. There’s a lot of creative back and forth, which is fun and I love it! I think it’s sharpening. Some of the feedback, I just take it as something constructive and critical to make it the best. That’s always interesting, it’s so nice listening to other people’s take on LZ7 and what they think will work and then we turn it into something that’s us.
You also create Christian music, what’s the reception to this like? Do you have fans from both religious and non-religious backgrounds?
If we do a Derulo gig, 99.9999% of people would’ve never heard of us. The music creates a platform for the purpose of this message that’s positive and hopeful. So there’s purpose and platform, and I’d say we’re Christians in a band, not a Christian band. If you Google Christian bands, you’ll come up with worship music and people like Brandon Lake or Matt Redman, all of these big worship guys. For us, it’s the middle ground between the two. If we have faith, you can hear what we’ve done but in a way that other people understand. It’s topical but it’s what we say in between the songs that set it up for people to get it. At the same time, the drop is something you’d experience at a Chasing Status or Stormzy gig, when the sub hits you. That’s the platform that music can create for this purpose. There is a fine line, and we merge both worlds with the mainstream. 250 year 10s on a Monday morning when they’ve never heard of us, that’s a mainstream world that moves me. We go to a Christian world, and everyone gets the message that comes with it. The partnership of those two worlds work beautifully. When people box it as a Christian band, I would say there’s a definite ethos of that in it, just like any other band or artist. Like Ed Sheeran, when he writes The A Team, he’s talking about someone dealing with tough choices in life, so the foundation is for that person to get better. There’s a foundation to us that we want you to squeeze the juice out of life without having to get a big Bible like, ‘you have to believe this!’. It’s more ‘just open your head up’.
So, about your support act for Jason Derulo, how did this collaboration come to life in the first place?
A few years ago we did Jason’s Two Sides World Tour, and we did 26 dates. We were really new, but it went really well. When it came to this one, I heard that he was on tour and I picked it up with our agent. We asked about opening the European and UK dates, and on Christmas Eve we got the message that tour’s wide open for us. I think that’s because we know how to warm a crowd up, how to get people going but also how to create an atmosphere in the room that prepares them for something big, and Jason’s show is big, it’s next-level good! I feel like we compliment that quite well.
We’d done a lot for remixes in the set of other people’s tracks that other people recognise. I call them trigger tracks, we then merge it with our stuff. We talk for a couple of minutes and we then come back to party a bit at the end. It feels very complimentary.
How are you feeling about supporting Jason Derulo?
It’s a mind bend. You get on stage, and I had mates come to the Co-op live and they were shocked like, ‘that’s my mate! It’s Co-op, and it’s full and that’s my mate!’ They came up afterwards, they couldn’t believe it. I sent them a couple of photos of what I see, and it’s like 20,000 people with their lights up, and that’s my view. It’s grounding and humbling to do it, and at the same time it’s mind blowing! All these people are listening to us right now and enjoying it, that’s insane! It’s just night after night after night, the rush is incredible, it’s amazing. We feel very privileged, very humbled. Thank you Jason very much, for taking us and trusting in us, and believing in us to do a good job for him and also allowing us to share the heart behind us.
Do you think you’d ever like to collaborate with Jason Derulo on a track or maybe even an album or EP?
We flew over to L.A a couple of years ago, because he invited us to write at the studio in his house. His musical director had written a couple of songs for LZ7 as well. At the time I questioned whether we’d fit, whether that’s the right dynamic. But, the best song hasn’t come along yet, and maybe there’s something we can pitch. You just don’t know, but at the same time there’s lots of opportunities with different writers. He’s going through this podcast called The Last Dance, which is a transition from the old Jason to a new version of himself. He said on Good Britain that he’s not stopping what he’s doing, he’s just changing. Like a butterfly, this new Jason is going to come along, and maybe there’s an opportunity there for us to do something.
What’s the most memorable moment from your recent tours?
Let’s talk about this tour. Every night, when we talk and share that message and lights go up, we’re getting a round of applause and cheers. Lots of people get it, and that moment feels really special because it’s taken 20 minutes to get to that point to really listen to it, and that’s really humbling, almost choking.
There’s a new song we’ve written called New Horizons, and in my talk bit I’ll share about 2025 maybe being a shocker, 2026 might be starting out as a really tough year. This is the moment to lift your head and look to the horizon, look above the clouds and see the world for what it is. Having an attitude of gratitude, being thankful for this life and squeezing the juice out of it. It’s a bit of a choker for me, and at the same time you can connect with other people. It’s like pick [your worries] up and drop [them] at the door, you will have the best night of your life, you will love this show, and that moment for me on the inside that’s choking me up, something really hits us then.
On your website, there’s a very nice quote saying “LZ7 ARE ON A QUEST TO BRING THEIR STYLE OF MUSIC THAT BYPASSES THE INTELLECT AND SPEAKS STRAIGHT TO THE SOUL”. So, with that in mind, what do you hope or think that fans feel when they leave an LZ7 show?
At the Co-op I walked out the back with my mate to go and meet him. A lot of people came up to us saying ‘the way that you articulated that, the way you spoke about mental health, that really resonated with me’. Another lady, a little bit older, came up and thanked us for being bold about sharing that stuff, because her husband took his life 6 months ago and it’s impacted her family. She thanked us for resourcing people with a QR code that we have on the screen that can help people through that journey or answer the big questions in life. That’s just incredible watching people resonate with it, they feel the music and then they also resonate with the music. My idea would be that everybody walks out feeling like 10 men! So they feel like they can do this, like they have life and a better version of themselves. Hearing just those few stories from those few people is amazing and really moving.
Do you have any dream future collaborations or venues to perform in? What do you envision as the next milestone for the band?
The absolute pinnacle for me would… I flippin’ love Coldplay! In the last few years I’ve been to a few sets, and Chris Martin does a very similar thing to us, where he’ll bring the chords down and speak life. There’s definitely some meat to that, there’s something more to it and you can hear him saying it. When he sings songs like Sky Full of Stars, he’s singing about life for people. He’s such a humble, nice guy, I’d love to sit with him in a room for an hour and ask about dropping a song and seeing what happens. We’re from a similar genre, of similar ages, so he really inspires me to go out and do something that would impact the world. But then, if someone like Stormzy or Chasing Status, or other big dogs would like to jump on a collab, then 100%, we’re open for that and you never know…
Afterword
If you’ve never been to an LZ7 gig before, then the message of the band should be enough to encourage you. The conversation itself has been very insightful, and the energy Lindz brings about leaves you with nothing but hope. Whether you’re faith-based or not, LZ7’s shows are a great opportunity to feel that energy, too.
Thank you to Lindz and the band for this interview, thank you to his team for making this happen and I hope that this piece left you a little more hopeful and energised to always choose life, to always choose adventure and to find all of the delight in this journey.
You can follow LZ7 on their Instagram page here @lz7ogram to make sure you’re up to date with all of their releases, upcoming shows and festival appearances. Their music can be listened to through most streaming services, and their merchandise (including analogue music formats) can be purchased through their website here: LZ7 STORE | LIGHT.
Article by Rozalia Lewandowska
