Oh He Dead

BIOGRAPHY

Washington, D.C. Band Oh He Dead is feeling dizzy. Following the success of their 2024 full length Ugly, they’ve been touring incessantly while shooting a documentary about making it as an indie band. And, most importantly, writing. Constantly. The rock-tinged, utterly dynamic act sorted through more than a 100 tracks before voting on their favorites to forge their new long player Vertigo.

Recorded with Nashville-based producer Jimmy Mansfield (Eric Church, Lainey Wilson) Vertigo is a dynamic, broad-stroke slab of genre-agnostic creativity; endlessly surprising and eminently engaging . A heady amalgam of R&B and indie rock, sprinkled with a dusting of psych (and just a dash of disco), the record’s title reflects the group’s life over the past few years. Non-stop, bursting with both pleasure and drama, and, sure, that titular feeling of losing control (in a good way).

Oh He Dead is an eclectic family, where an underlying powerful love leads the way. But they’re not without edge; they’ll throw down for each other at a moment’s notice. See their band name, which was inspired by that time some foolish boy cheated on frontman CJ Johnson. “Oh, he dead,” she quipped when someone asked what befell him.

In fact, Oh He Dead has been a family unit since day one. The first iteration of the band formed in 2016, then solidified with the addition of Alex Salser in 2018; a guitarist who’s also a popular adjunct professor at American University. The band broke out in 2018, with the groovy “Lonely Sometimes”. After submitting a video of them performing the song to NPR’s Tiny Desk Contest, it went viral, attracting fans beyond their beloved D.C. A self-titled album followed that same year, followed by Pretty in 2023.

The band found its final form over the ensuing years, rounding out their sound with resident accessory enthusiast/perfectionist Adam Ashforth (drums), visionary Piano Whitman (keys), and Colin Sidley on bass, dropped their third album, Ugly, in 2024. They hit that road hard following that release. While they rolled through cities and countries they’d never visited before they’d write, adding new layers to snatches of sound and whittling down the possibilities for a new album.

Once they had a basic idea of which tracks to feature on the record, they sat in a circle in an Oregon Airbnb and recorded their final choices on an iPhone, Johnson sometimes writing lyrics on the fly for unfinished songs. The result? Vertigo, a dervish of an album whose cover features a dazed photo of Johnson’s child, Wallace, that had become a band meme.

From “Claire’s Song,” a silky ode to friendship, to the hypnotically groovy “Puts Me to Shame”, Vertigo captures a band confidently stretching the definition of their “sound”. The frenetic “The Weight” started out as a straight-ahead rock song, they slid in a delicious layer of R&B sleaze. Salser wrote the spaced-out “Bioluminescence” during Covid, convinced it would die on his hard drive. When the band played it at a local club, though, the crowd went wild. It was going on the record. The groovy of “Up and Down” slides in next, before it all ends with the anthemic “Butterfly” which Whitman says is about uplifting women. “I just kept thinking about this butterfly who has no idea how beautiful she is. We see this beauty in this little bug that brings so much joy and has so much meaning attached to it. And they're really fragile, but they're quite resilient. They keep flying, even with broken wings.”

And so do bands, even when they’re dizzy, even when they’re tired, even when they’re reeling - because music brings them joy. So, lean back, turn it up, and experience a little Vertigo for yourself. Feel that underlying powerful love. Welcome to the family.