The plan was for Zeke to pick me up from a train station in northern New Jersey, just a few minutes from their parents’ home. But right before we’re supposed to meet, I get a text announcing a slight switch-up. “my mom is gonna be in the car w me bc i dont know how to get there,” Zeke reports, ending the message with a sob emoji. Within 10 minutes, a blue Honda Pilot rolls up to the parking lot, with a middle-aged brunette woman beaming in the driver’s seat. Zeke is slouched next to her, and as we back out and proceed on the route home, they are mostly silent, except to point out a tree that’s fallen in the middle of the road.
The 18-year-old, who doesn’t want to share their last name because of privacy concerns, technically lives on campus at a college about an hour away. Still, every weekend they return to their parents’ house, where they record and produce all of their music as dltzk (“delete zeke”). Their mom and dad might not know it, but over the past year Zeke has become one of the faces of digicore, a scene of zoomer SoundCloud artists who make agitated, mercurial music usually featuring blown-out production and sullen, Auto-Tuned singing. Listening to some of their songs can feel like blasting through TikTok at supersonic speed, a sensory overload that could very well send your elderly neighbor into cardiac arrest.
Their parents’ home feels like a Pinterest-lover’s dream: Its three main aesthetics are beachside resort, Buddha, and, on this foggy day in December, Christmas. An elegant tree draped in glittery red and gold ribbon towers above the living room, which is festooned with throw pillows with slogans like “Merry & Bright.” The family’s three cats, Mr. Jones, Charlie, and Spooky, prowl around the perimeters, yowling to be let outdoors.
As Zeke’s parents make small talk, Zeke loiters—politely, timidly—in the background. They are scrawny, with hollowed cheeks and curly hair; their hands are shoved into the pockets of their puffer jacket, which is layered over a Phoebe Bridgers graphic tee. (At one point, about 90 percent of Zeke’s closet was made up of artist merch, as they admit later on.) This is Zeke’s first in-person interview, and the perceived formality of the arrangement initially creates a hesitant dynamic. When their mom and dad tactfully exit the conversation (“We’ll leave you two to it!”), it feels like we’re random children paired on a stilted playdate. “Sorry for being awkward,” Zeke offers, to break the ice. It’s about lunchtime, so we go to the closest restaurant available, Panera.
In between slurps of French onion soup, Zeke confesses their ambivalence toward college, especially now that their music has taken off online. “It’s not the worst thing I’ve done ever, but I could be doing better things,” they say, a sentiment they recently shared less diplomatically on Twitter: “the one thing that separates me from hannah montana is that she was never smart enough to consider dropping out.” When they were applying to schools a year ago, they had just a few one-off singles and a couple thousand followers; now they have multiple projects out and over 100,000 monthly Spotify streams. Last spring, a concerned high school counselor called Zeke into her office after a classmate wrote a paper about their song “52 Blue Mondays,” on which Zeke repeats, “I feel like dying every season.” The counselor wanted to check if Zeke was OK.
Still, Zeke doesn’t disclose much with the people who surround them in real life, even those who share their DNA: “My twin sister found my Twitter, and she was like, ‘Why do you have so many followers?’”
Zeke’s music falls roughly within two camps. There’s the prankish mixes they put out under other aliases (leroy, DJcoolgirl9), like their “dariacore” mash-up compilations, named after the ’90s animated series about a sardonic teenage girl. (“Daria’s just, like, cool,” they shrug.) The style is something like future bass meets Jersey club meets SoundClown shitposting—sped-up versions of the music Zeke was fascinated by when they were 9. A particularly formative moment from their childhood was getting their mind blown by a Skrillex performance on MTV. “I don’t even know how to verbalize it,” they recall. “It was just like, ‘Whoa.’”
Then there’s Zeke’s more personal, original dltzk material. Dealing with the disorientation of adolescence and the stultifying sense that they had no real future ahead of them, they released Teen Week last spring. “Go to college, have a shit time/I’ll get a job and I won’t be happy/But if you ask I’ll say I’m fine,” they sing on “seventeen.” The EP bears the imprint of their EDM obsessions, especially the galactic electronica of their idol, Porter Robinson, and embraces production elements that have been trendy in underground online communities, like breakbeats, stutters, and bitcrushing. Teen Week became a lodestar of SoundCloud’s digicore scene, which sprouted from hyperpop. In November came its more mature companion, Frailty, dltzk’s full-length debut.
Frailty is still exuberant and kaleidoscopic, but it also includes lo-fi passages reminiscent of the Microphones or Alex G. Zeke found the acoustic guitar featured on the album in a closet at home last year, and started learning how to play. At first, they’d record one string at a time, mimicking the sound of a full chord by layering individual notes on top of each other using production software. “Kind of phony of me,” they admit, “but you gotta do what you gotta do.” They still don’t play the “right” way. Instead, they tuned their guitar so they can simply push their thumb across a single fret and strum. “My hands are really small so it’s easier for me,” they explain, demonstrating the technique. To record, Zeke would lay their phone on the guitar, record a voice memo, and email the file to their computer to edit.
Zeke’s songs are rife with angst: about bad friends and parental disappointment, about crushes on close-minded people who’d probably hate Zeke if they really knew them. Some of their unease comes from feeling alienated from their peers. After being subjected to run-of-the-mill bullying in middle school, they pushed themselves to act more masculine: “I listened to [the rapper] Logic freshman year and started wearing cargo shorts.” But they still felt estranged.
Meanwhile, Zeke has also developed an overwhelming, if seemingly abstract, fear of letting their parents down. “Sorry I’m not what you wanted, I know you can’t try again,” they sing, addressing their dad, on “cartridge.” They’re aware, though, that these worries may not be totally grounded in reality. “I feel like what I imagine my parents want me to be is different than what my parents actually want me to be,” they admit, “like the image that I’m fabricating in my mind is not real.”
Zeke is still too sheepish to work on music in their dorm, where their roommate or neighbors might hear. So they jot down ideas and wait to try them out in their childhood bedroom, alone. The space is spartan, with azure blue walls and what looks like standard IKEA furniture: a bed, some shelves, a desk with a monitor. A plain composition notebook that functions as Zeke’s “manifestation journal” rests atop a cabinet near their desk. There’s not much else to show, so Zeke fires up their computer, and we talk about their favorite artists (Mitski, the rapper Hook) and the bank of “silly little samples” embedded into their recordings—including snippets from the Nickelodeon boy band Big Time Rush and their friend and fellow digicore artist angelus. I ask whether the screams in a few of their songs are their own. “No,” they laugh; even in their own room, they’re worried about disturbing their family. “Every one is someone else’s.”
This shy instinct seeps into their singing style. “I record most of the time when my parents are home, and I’m just trying to whisper,” they say, sounding defeated. Their bedroom is more secure than their dorm, but it isn’t ideal. Once they make enough money through streaming, they plan to buy a car. Maybe that’ll give them some independence. Maybe there they could be loud.
When Zeke needs space, they disappear into the woods at the edge of town. We walk there in the afternoon—past quaint, wood-paneled homes with the same plastic nativity set and deflated Santas on the front lawn. “It’s a very pretty place, but if I stay for too long, my brain’s gonna turn to mush,” they say, surveying the neighborhood. For a while, they liked to satirize the locals’ obliviousness, like in their 2020 song “what’s my age again?,” which contains a joke about “curb stomping a Republican.” We cut across a barren park with a dirt baseball field and an empty playground en route to an area where the trees are all scraggly and dead.
No one is around, and the privacy makes things feel tranquil and safe. We talk more about their parents and how Zeke characterizes their own sense of humor. “I have a love-hate relationship with the term ‘terminally online’ just because it’s so true that it hurts,” they say. At some point, they try to FaceTime their friend, who doesn’t pick up. In this secluded spot, most of Zeke’s trepidation seems to evaporate.
My feet keep sinking into mud, so we start to head back. On the way, we joke about what I might report in this profile.
“They took me to the forest, and we fell down a hill, and I broke my leg,” Zeke riffs.
“They had their mom drive me to an undisclosed location because they couldn’t get there,” I add.
“Yeah, that’s the one-sentence summary.”
When it’s time for me to head home, Zeke drives their mom’s car back to the station.
dltzk: I think “frailty” means both weakness in the body and the mind. A lot of the experiences I talked about [on the album] happened during a time when I was physically and mentally not well. Physically in the sense that I got diagnosed with an eating disorder in May 2019. It wasn’t that I was forcing myself not to eat. It’s just that I got too preoccupied and anxious to eat.
When I was making the album, I was really bored. So I was going on Google Maps, searching random spots in the U.S. for cool stuff to screenshot. There were a couple of highways. There was this place in North Dakota with a bus in the front yard—I was going to use that, but the screenshot was too low quality.
Then I came across that house. I thought it was cool how the people in the photo are looking at the camera. And just the way the house looks. Everything felt ominous, but also familiar—like what I see when I go on my walks just outside of my house. So I took the screenshot and put a bunch of grain and JPEG damage on it. I had the image saved on my computer under its address—300 Locust St., Enid, Oklahoma—but when I went back six months later, I couldn’t find it. That’s spooky.
I usually write everything at once, then the melody comes after. Then I record it, and I listen to it 50 times. And then I’m like, “Wait, this line was actually really corny and I should change it.” That’s still happening with Frailty, where I think things are corny but I can’t change them now. I don’t think I’ll ever be truly content with my songwriting, but I’m gradually improving.
That’s most of them now. It’s not like, “Oh, this is triggering,” it’s just corny. Like on “seventeen,” the opening line: “I hate everything ’cause everything hates me too.” I guess what I can give myself credit for is that it’s genuine, it’s how I was feeling at the time. But if I could rate Teen Week right now, I’d give it a 4 or a 5 out of 10, to be honest. I’ll just do a Teen Week (Zeke’s Version) five years down the line.
My imposter syndrome is very real now, and I feel like it’s only gonna get worse over time. But I think that just means I’m getting better. I mean, you can’t have imposter syndrome and not be somewhat proud of what you make, in my opinion.
I would be lying if I said I didn’t doubt Frailty like once a week, thinking, This album is not good enough for coverage whatsoever. That’s obviously not true. But I feel like doubting yourself is a very much part of the process. If you make music without doubting yourself, it’s not really going to sound good.
