For a band that technically didn’t exist yet, The Runarounds took the long way around. Years, actually. Before the show, before the name, before anyone was supposed to know what was happening. Zende Murdoch was 18 when he clicked on what looked like an Instagram casting call for extras on Outer Banks—a low-stakes shot at a couple hundred bucks and maybe meeting musicians who could actually play. “My only hope,” he says, “was just maybe make a few hundred bucks and then meet kids on the other side that would be really good at their instrument.”
Instead, he got a Zoom call and a curveball.
“Jonas Pate was like, ‘Hey—TV show?’ And I was like, ‘Oh, wow, I thought this was for your TV show.’ And he goes, ‘No, it is my TV show, but another one. You want to be in it?’” Murdoch laughs. “I was like, ‘You going to teach me how to act?’ He’s like, ‘Yep.’ And I was like, ‘Okay.’ It’s the best bait-and-switch ever.”
What followed wasn’t the usual TV-band factory line. No instant branding, no fast-tracked singles. Instead, the band—spread across five parts of the country—was quietly given time. “The idea was just for us to get to know each other,” Murdoch says. “Write some songs. Maybe develop a sound, if that’s even possible yet.” For a long stretch, there wasn’t even a band name. Just songs, trips, and secrecy. “You’re telling people even though you shouldn’t, and they’re like, ‘Are you sure that’s really happening?’ And then several years go by and it still hasn’t happened, and it looks bad.”
Somehow, the trust kept deepening. They were paired with Jerry Harrison of Talking Heads to produce an early EP. “He just took a liking to us,” Murdoch shrugs. “Not sure why, but we loved him.” It was less coronation than apprenticeship. Underground, unpublicized, and still very much about becoming a band before pretending to be one.
That patience extended to the cameras. First: just play. Then: play on Outer Banks. Then: the pilot. “Everything was done in baby steps,” Murdoch says. “So it’s digestible.” The result is a rare thing—a TV show about a band that doesn’t feel like cosplay. Part of that is the music ecosystem the show drops them into early, name-checking Spoon, Dr. Dog, Zeppelin, Green Day, Jack White, Franz Ferdinand. The template is there, but the direction wasn’t dictated. “We weren’t really pushed in any direction by the TV show,” Murdoch says. “They wanted it to feel as authentic as possible. So it was like, let the kids do their thing.”
That freedom came with pressure. “We were all 18, 19,” he says. “They just kind of put their faith in us. It was a lot of pressure, but also really fun, because we understood we were in the driver’s seat.” Finding the sound took time—years, even. Songs piled up, wildly different from each other. “You’d have this batch of songs that were so diverse,” he says. “This one’s really cool, but it sounds nothing like this one.”
Eventually, something clicked. By 2022, tracks like “Senior Year” helped pin it down: indie rock as a shared middle ground, filtered through five different musical upbringings. You can still hear the range—sometimes in a single song. Take “Funny How the Universe Works,” which starts as an acoustic idea and ends in a borderline prog-rock sprint. “Will brought that one in,” Murdoch says, crediting bandmate Will for the song’s core. “I just wanted the drum part to feel intricate—syncopated with what he was doing.” The climactic ending came together in a rehearsal room, Murdoch frantically running in circles trying to explain it. “Luckily everybody thought it was fun.”
Then came the moment every TV band eventually has to face: the first song that isn’t for the show. The proof-of-life track. “This is the ‘we are a real band’ moment,” Murdoch says of “Chasing the Good Times.” It came together in Nashville with Brad Schultz of Cage the Elephant, who brought in the chorus himself—an unprecedented move for The Runarounds. “That’s the only time that’s happened in Runarounds history,” Murdoch says. “It felt fresh as ever.”
Schultz’s presence was equal parts mentor and hype man. “Anytime Brad liked something, he’d just turn around and start air-drumming,” Murdoch laughs. “‘This is good, huh?’ And you’re like, ‘Yeah, Brad. This is good.’” The session overlapped with Murdoch watching a rough cut of the show for the first time on his iPad in the corner. Art imitating life, life sprinting to keep up.
Now the experiment is public. Tours are selling out. Fans are showing up for the band, not just the show. “All I’ve ever known is begging people to come to shows,” Murdoch says. “It’s crazy to be on the other side, trying to open up more space because people want to be there.” Whether or not there’s a second season, the band keeps going. That was always the point.
“No one can stop us from doing the band thing now,” he says. “TV show or not.”
Watch the full interview above and then check out the trailer below.
