Zach Templar

Zach Templar makes ambitious indie rock with a scrappy edge. It’s the sort of music that makes tiny moments feel enormous and is delivered with so much honesty, you feel like you’re in the room with the 18-year-old as he pours his guts out. Raised on a diet of Childish Gambino, Frank Ocean and Omar Apollo, Zach Templar’s music is a “colourful mesh” of everything he loves. Some songs are pretty, stripped back confessionals, others are distorted and melancholic or offer woozy, defiant hope. “I try not to create a box for myself,” he explains, with a heart-first approach to everything he does. “They’re all a vibe though.” Zach first dabbled in music while still at school, learning classical piano and getting involved in theatre productions but felt stifled telling other people’s tales. “I wanted to write my own stories,” he says. Zach also wanted people to hear them, so taught himself how to produce on a “terrible” laptop before uploading a number of rough and ready tracks to Soundcloud. “Tyler, The Creator and Prince were both big inspirations, because they both wrote and produced their own music. I was also inspired by MF Doom, J Dilla and Steve Lacey though,” he says. It’s a cool blend of forward-thinking artists but his first few songs got lost in the ether. Rather than give up though Zach put in the work emailing 1000s of different playlists and putting himself out there on social media. “I had to learn not to care about looking stupid or putting out songs people might not like. It was all about what I thought was cool.”