The Runarounds’ Zendé Murdock on Tour, Patience and Staring at the Ceiling
The Runarounds. Photo by Isaiah Pate via Big Feat PR.
Sprinting to success with back-to-back tours, a debut album and their own television show, The Runarounds are certainly living up to their boisterous name. But for drummer Zendé Murdock, it’s the moments between whirlwinds that win the race.
The five-piece came together from a casting call to play a house band in Netflix’s “Outer Banks,” and while the expectations and outcomes for the unusually-formed band weren’t always clear, their intentions certainly were: to make damn good music. Now, after a five-year period of finding their musical footing, taking acting lessons and simply “hanging out,” The Runarounds have charmed their way into the hearts of indie rock lovers. Murdock (drums), Axel Ellis (guitar/vocals), Jesse Golliher (bass/vocals), Jeremy Yun (lead guitar) and William Lipton (guitar/vocals) make the kind of classic guitar rock anthems only a group of full-fledged musical powerhouses can. With earworm-worthy riffs, electric drum fills and catchy yet tactfully-written lyrics, their songs exude a palpable energy that could fuel a tour bus for months.
After dropping their debut album, which acts as the soundtrack for their eponymous Amazon Prime show, the band checked off two boxes at once as their first headlining tour became their first sold-out tour in the fall. To kick off the new year, The Runarounds are following up the release of single “Chasing The Good Times” with a 33-date, sold-out tour. With just a few days left before rehearsals start, Murdock sat down with Off the Record to talk all things road life, enjoying the journey and where they go from here.
With the release of your debut album, eponymous Amazon Prime show and headline tour, 2025 was obviously a big year for you guys. What’s something you learned last year that you want to take into 2026?
Well, I can kind of put all five years of the history together into one word and call it patience, because it took a very long time to kind of get to last year — and to get to this year — which is where a lot of the goals that we set several years ago are hopefully coming true. So yeah, I'm gonna go with that one word, patience.
How do you hope to practice patience this year?
Luckily, this year it feels like a lot of things that we have been patient for are kind of paying off, so hopefully it'll be less waiting and more doing this year, and it's shaping up to be that way. But, if we are lucky enough to get a second season of our show, I don't know that that would start filming until later in the year, and so I think there would be a nice gap of time between the end of the tour and the start of filming in which I would once again have to just kind of chill and be patient.
But I feel like I've gotten really, really good at killing time when waiting for something really exciting in The Runarounds. You know, it can be extra hard to kind of sit on your hands when you're really stoked to go and do something, but we've got a lot of experience with that now, so I know how to handle it mentally.
Speaking of tour and 2026, you guys head on your sold out, 33-date tour next week. Is there anything you’re planning on doing differently from the fall 2025 tour?
Yeah, a bunch of stuff. I mean, it’s a completely different landscape this tour. We booked the first tour before our show came out, and we were extra careful not to book rooms that we didn't know if we could fill. We had no idea what the reception of the TV show was going to be like, whether it was going to be good or bad, and so we just wanted to make sure that we put together a tour that was, you know, within reach. Whereas this time around, we had a better landscape of how many people would want to come to our show.
The tours are very separate in that way in terms of the room sizes that we're playing and the way we're traveling and everything, so it's a very different tour. It's almost like I'm flipping your question in a way where it's like, “What am I going to keep the same?” Which is hopefully just good performances and not being too nervous. These are some of the biggest shows any of us have ever played, and we're nervous. And so it's like, yeah, everything's a little bit different, everything's a little bit new, but I think one thing we'll keep the same is just the energy within the band, having fun and being goofy and, you know, playing our songs.
Watch the music video for “Ghosts” on YouTube.
What’s your favorite song to play live and why?
I really like playing “Ghosts,” which is funny because we didn't know that that was going to be one of the standout songs. I feel like every band has that story where like, you plan on having your standouts from the albums or your single and then all of a sudden a song that you didn't know was gonna resonate with people as much as it does ends up sticking out. That's “Ghosts” for us, which is awesome, but even before people were listening to it I feel like that song has always been the best medium of the five of our individual musical paths intersecting into the song.
I feel like that song and “Senior Year” are our best examples of that, so I really liked opening with “Ghosts” last tour. Unfortunately, they tell you you're not supposed to open with your biggest song, so we have to switch that up, which kind of makes me sad because it worked really well as the opener, but we'll find a good place for it. But yeah, I love playing that song.
So when auditioning for The Runarounds, you said that you were mainly looking for new band members to make music with more seriously. After getting the gig, how did the five of you find your serious creative process, and how is it different from other bands you’ve worked with?
Well, first of all, it took us a second — it took a few years to kind of find its sea legs. I think with other groups that I've played in, the meeting process was obviously a little bit more natural than this whole TV show aspect to this group, and so I guess what that makes for is starting at a more similar starting point musically. In terms of the bands that you're into and a vision for the band, when you're put together like this, that whole process of finding people with similar interests gets skipped, and so you end up in a band with a lot of different musical influences.
So yeah, it just took us a minute to kind of figure out what everybody wants to do and how it can intersect with each other, and we did that just by writing songs and hanging out, you know, nothing too crazy. You just got to throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks and find a sound that everybody can be happy with.
Do you think because you came together under these unique circumstances that there was a kind of forged bond there? Did that help at all with finding your creative rhythm?
Yeah, absolutely. I think it was one of those things where we recognized how unique the opportunity that we were placed in was, and so there's a lot of gratitude there. Also, it's such a unique experience that it kind of felt like the only people that would fully understand it were the other boys that have been through it. So yeah, that very much showed up. There's very much a forged bond of like, these are the guys that I'm going to experience whatever this rollercoaster of a project might be with. And so I feel like everybody kind of had that, and yeah, the bond definitely showed in that.
“Chasing The Good Times” is your first release since the show and album came out, and to me it feels like a continuation of the show’s story while still being authentic to your experiences as real 20-something-year-olds navigating the world. How do you balance that dichotomy in songwriting?
Man, that's a really good question. I think that “Chasing the Good Times” is one of those songs where we always describe it as like — I mean, obviously, it's the first time that we're venturing back into songwriting after the release of the show, as you said, and so we always kind of feel like that song is the start of a fresh direction for us. Not that we're going to switch it up in some kind of crazy way and be unrecognizable, but it's just the natural progression of a band and its songwriting. And so yeah, it was fresh territory for us, and it felt new, and that made us all really happy.
And we wrote it with an incredible dude named Brad Shultz, who's the guitarist for a band named Cage the Elephant, and he was so instrumental in kind of bringing it all together. It was a hell of an experience for us, and so it just got us excited about what's coming in future songwriting sessions. And if we do a second season, I don't even know if that song appears in the show. We would love for it to. I guess that would just tie in with story and all that. But yeah, at the moment we're writing to write, and we're hoping that as much of what we do can land in the second season. But yeah, it's so early in terms of a season two that we're just we're writing to write and making stuff that we enjoy.
What was it like for you to work with Brad Shultz, and do you think that “writing to write” will help your sound evolve more to emulate that single?
It was really, really cool. Obviously, he's a legend and so is his band, and so we were all really, really stoked and, of course, really nervous to go into that session. But it's funny, to rehearse for the tour, we're going to Nashville and staying in the same Airbnb that we stayed in when we did this songwriting session for “Chasing the Good Times,” and so I'm actually hoping to get the same room, looking forward to just like, staring at that same ceiling. I don't think we've ever returned to somewhere that we stayed before, so that's just a random little tidbit about “Chasing the Good Times” that I'm enjoying at the moment.
But as far as leaning more into what we did there, yes and no. I mean, I feel like “Chasing The Good Times” sounds slightly differently than the season one album, and that's awesome. I think we're going to try and do a little bit more that sounds like it and then do some more stuff that's, you know, closer to the season one sound and just have a good mix of the band evolving.
The Runarounds. Photo by Isaiah Pate via Big Feat PR.
If you’ll indulge me, I’d love to talk about “Killed My Youth” because it’s been my favorite from the album since first hearing it. From the killer drum intro to the energy that never lets up, can you talk about how that track came to be?
Is that right? Absolutely! It’s the only song that I’ve ever written the guitar part for, and I think it will remain that way as well.
I did not plan that, I swear!
No, I’m stoked about the question. Myself, Will and Jesse went to a studio in Malibu around this time of the year two years ago, and we worked with a guy named Dave Bassett, and he was awesome. He hosted us at his home studio, and we just kind of went up there and we were blown away by the views and that stuff in Malibu. It was awesome. And so we were all feeling really inspired, and there weren't any drums on the first day, so I was on the guitar, and I found something on accident. I’m not a very good guitarist and I didn't know the names of the chords that I was playing, but I found something on accident, and I showed it to Jesse. He thought it was really cool. It's the main progression that Jeremy's playing throughout the song, and then he technically broke it down and showed me what I was playing, and I was like, “Okay, sweet.” And then I was lucky enough to be able to track guitar on the demo and stuff. It was a fun day for me just because it was unlike any of the other Runarounds songs that were ever written. And so yeah, made me really happy. As far as the drum part, I got excited and wrote a really exhausting drum part, so that song absolutely crushed me on the last tour. Really tiring. I'm sure it'll do the same.
But I’m sure it’ll be worth it. So as you head back on tour for a few months, what does a typical day off on the road look like for you?
It looks like massage gunning and getting food. I need to recover on the off days because, especially on this tour, there's a lot of three-shows-on, one-day-off, four-shows-on, one-day-off. There's not a whole lot of resting going on, which is nice because I feel like if you're sitting around, it can get weird.
But yeah, I really try and recover physically on the off days. And also on this tour, we're on a bus. We've never been on a bus tour before, and so I almost don't know what travel looks like, like whether we're traveling off days or not. That ain't my department. I just get on the bus and see what happens. But yeah, so it's a little bit of uncharted territory for me and for the other guys. We don't really know what's going on. It's all new and fresh, but if there's one thing I will be doing, it's using that massage gun.
Is there a specific city you’re most excited to hit?
I'm going to so many places I've never been to before. I've only been to a few of the cities on this tour, so I'm stoked for, honestly, the large majority of the tour. If I had to narrow down, I think the bigger the show, the more excited I get, because the more scared I am, and that's nice. So yeah, we're playing Chicago, Dallas is the first show on the tour, and I believe it's the biggest show on the tour, so that's terrifying. I'm really stoked for those two, I think they're the same size. And then, yeah, there's a lot of places I just haven't been. And everybody always says that when you tour you don't get to really see much of the cities that you're in because it's just a lot of green rooms and venues, but we're going to try our best to do as much sightseeing as possible.
After tour, what’s next for The Runarounds?
Well, we're hoping to get picked up for a second season while on the tour, and so it's nice to not have to come off of tour not knowing what the future looks like, as we don't right now, which is very stressful at the moment. Yeah, it's nice that we don't have to kind of go into having nothing scheduled, because if we get a second season we would know by the time we come off, and so in that world of season two, we would immediately start preparing for it. Get the songs together, get them recorded, get them written, go through acting coaching, of course, because we're still super new at acting. And yeah, I'm pretty sure that would just be a three or four month period of just prepping and being excited and practicing patience, as we talked about earlier. And then yeah, hopefully we'd start filming towards the end of the summer, maybe early fall, at some point next year. So that's the plan. I'm trying not to think about a world without it, but even if we don't, we'll continue making music and touring at least for another year and keep doing the thing. So yeah, we're trying not to look too far ahead, but at least 2026 we have somewhat of a game plan for either world.
You can catch The Runarounds on their North American tour this winter.