Omaha rock band The Real Zebos released their latest album “ZEBOHATER” in October.
The album has a dance-rock sound in line with some of their biggest past hits, such as “Your Ex Said You Can’t Dance” and their cover of 1980s one-hit wonder from “Puttin’ On The Ritz” from Taco.
Both of those songs have millions of streams, as does their most played song, “Rock Star Skinny.” The band released a deluxe album of many of their EPs in their “no style” series, comprising 50 tracks earlier this year. They currently have over 100,000 monthly listeners on Spotify alone. Connor Brandt and Jordan Gaul make up the core of The Real Zebos, and they come up with a lot of fun marketing, on-stage gimmicks, and easily fit into the content-driven music industry. The band is active on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and even got banned from dating app Tinder for promoting their music. Their latest TikTok leads one to believe that “Morgan Freeman” may be introducing them at their album release show at Waiting Room Lounge on Friday, Nov. 14. That show will also include Infielder and Madelline Reddel.
Brandt and Gaul chatted about the new album, mixing up the styles of their songs, and traversing the social media landscape over coffee in the Old Market.
The duo found each other through Craigslist in 2014, even though they both lived within feet of each other at UNO. The two found out that they had very similar tastes in music.
“We both took to Craigslist independently, and I found Connor had written an article that sounded exactly like something that I would write — both in aspirations and like the entire list of bands. It was like check, check, check, check,” Gaul said. “There’s some pretty obvious stuff like The Beatles, Weezer, Ben Folds, but I remember Tally Hall being a specific one and Jukebox the Ghost. Like something smaller, a little more niche, like indie pop bands from the late 2000s that definitely scratch my brain just right.”
After that, the duo took a more bedroom pop approach to music.
“It was a lot of just figuring out how to record songs or how to make songs, and for the next three or four years we weren’t actually a band — more so just a bedroom project,” Brandt said. “Before there was the concept of the bedroom pop artist. So we didn’t consider that we could release and promote it this way. We were waiting to become real. So in our mind, it was all that stuff that was still demos until we could get a band and perform live.”
The band first performed live in 2018 after using Craigslist again to find band members. They played a lot of shows and then the COVID-19 pandemic hit and put a halt to that. Like most artists during COVID, focusing on social media was the only option. The band went on to perform at the Maha Music Festival in 2022.
Does the duo think that their fanbase comes more from their social media exploits or their live shows?
“It had to be both, but I would assume that if our live show and the music wasn’t good then it also then it wouldn’t have taken off,” Brandt said. “So I hope that the social media helped boost it.”
“I mean, if you can demonstrate that you have a good personality, certain groups of people could be drawn to that,” Gaul added. “Some bands are very unfunny. You don’t want everybody to be funny, though. I mean, that would be miserable.”
Brandt added the group definitely has a strong fanbase.
“I mean, obviously there’s more people on the Internet than in Omaha, and have we found a lot of people through the algorithm whether Spotify or on social media,” he said.
“We’ve kind of tried a lot of things,” Gaul added. “We did this like a college radio ad campaign once and we paid some company to send out our CDs to 100 different college radio stations and they sent us like, stats. We ran Instagram ads, we constantly posted on social media, did bits and Connor had some TikToks kind of go, I’m not going to say viral because that would have changed things, but some bits go like half or quarter viral, modestly and that gives us some online engagement here and there.”
The duo said they had a slow and steady build, but find it hard to connect with their full online audience.
“For reference, we posted something today on Instagram,” Gaul said. “I saw that the impressions and number of accounts reached was about 3% of our followers.”
The Real Zebos have tried many different styles, and even put out a series of music called “no style” showing they were not focused on one way to play. The duo doesn’t feel like they need to stay in the dance-rock style of the new album “ZEBOHATER,” but feel good with where they are at. Gaul talked about the songs that connect with him on the album,
“‘See if I Care’ is the lead single. It’s a really fast-driven dance rock song and I guess it’s kind of a good sort of summation of this sort of direction that we’re going in for at least a little bit,” he said. “Even though it doesn’t sound like all the songs on there, it was one of the first songs that was like, this is what the album kind of is and then built around that for the track list. Another one I’ll mention is called ‘Saphead,’ where the instrumental is like something unlike what I’ve ever done before and it feels very nuanced in a way where our old stuff doesn’t quite hit. Some of the other stuff is a little more in your face, but this is a little more, it’s like showing restraint while still being catchy and it’s a special song to me. It came together in like three or four days, all of the bells and whistles beginning to end, which never happens when producing a song. So we’re pretty stoked on that.”
“I think we both said ‘Saphead,’” Brandt added when asked what his favorite song was. “I would say just in terms of setting the album apart from past stuff would be ‘Hunchback’ for me also. It represents writing on guitar, which I never do. I don’t play guitar, I can just noodle around. I used to write every guitar part on the keyboard and then the guitarist and bassist try to play it. This is kind of weird because it wasn’t written by a guitarist, so there’s quite a few songs point blank, where I’m trying to like write and record actually playing it how a guitarist would. That helps us go in the more guitar-driven direction because I play keys and most of the songs start that way, so I have to kind of flip my viewpoint and think like a guitarist.”
Gaul added the way fans have perceived their music has changed over the years.
“With this album, how our fans have perceived our music all this time is so different from what’s been in my head, how I perceive our music,” he said. “We have had this hard drive full of all this cool moody, angsty dance rock stuff and that is what I thought we sounded like, and it’s not what we have been putting out, so it is good to have that finally match”