With three increasingly strong Who Shot Scott EPs released in as many years, Tāmaki Makaurau rap artist/producer Zaidoon Nasir (Zee, as he introduces himself) earns further credit for being as creatively prolific as he is fiercely honest in his hip hop songwriting. Released early in February, Demons is matched with a drenchingly compelling Connor Pritchard music video. Made with support from NZ On Air Music. 

Demons dropped as the lead-in single to the release of Who Shot Scott’s ‘Mercy III’ EP – following 2021’s ‘Mercy’ and, you guessed it, ‘Mercy II’ in February last year. As Zee enthusiastically explains it was a reasoned choice.

“I think that it accurately sort of encapsulates the energy of the whole EP, not just lyrically but also sonically. This EP is a little bit more frantic, distorted. I mean a lot of my music is, but this one is very punk rock inspired, fused with alternative hip hop, and I feel like Demons is a good song to sort of champion it and set the tone that the rest of the EP has.

“And also topic-wise, it’s a song that’s about reflection. The theme of this EP overall is a reflection on having grown up and matured a lot over the last few years, coming up to like my late 20s, going through a lot in life that has sort of led me to certain realisations about who I am as a person.

“Each song on ‘Mercy III’ kind of delves into a different subject matter, but this one in a way that very much kind of encapsulates that overall reflective energy.”

Having fled war-torn Iraq aged just two and experiencing life in Moscow before he and his mother finally found a permanent home in Aotearoa, Zee has a unique personal back story. He’s been active as a beat maker and hip hop producer since his teen years, but it was the abrupt departure from his life of Zee’s long-time musical partner and best mate that led him into becoming the experimental hip hop artist Who Shot Scott.

The three EPs have seen him acknowledging angst, vulnerability and now a reflective evaluation of himself, in particular the double-edged sword of ego. As a self-produced artist, it’s clearly a necessity, but in recent years Zee has been on a journey to find a balance of ego in himself, and those near to him.

‘I’m pulling away from something but it’s calling my name,’ he calls at the start of Demons.

“The meaning is that I’m pulling away from the superficiality, I’m pulling away from ego. But just to create the art that I’m creating, I’m pulling away from ever serving my ego and not serving my art – which I feel is the highest thing to serve. But at the same time, by doing that, I’m levelling up through an industry that almost rewards ego! So it’s like as I’m pulling away from it, it’s calling my name even more.”

‘No, it wasn’t overnight I had to stay breathing. I had a lot of fake friends, had to face demons…’

Actually, those lyrics aren’t from this latest Who Shot Scott single but from Really Like That, which opened his second EP a year before. The two songs are musically quite different, but still, it makes you wonder if there is a connection?

“They’re definitely not directly linked, but it feels almost as if the ideas of where I’m at, again with that maturity and self-realisation, and coming to terms with a lot of my own sort of default programming in this world… as I write more songs, is getting more concise.

“I guess I’m just talking about it a lot more candidly really. Like in that track, there was a line about demons, whereas moving forward there’s a whole song!”

Overall, he concedes, he is singing about the same demons in the two tracks, but in a different way. In Really Like That the reference was more literal, about people and things in his life that he felt weren’t really helping promote his artistic expression.

“Whereas the song Demons is quite directly talking about the superficiality of the modern times that I feel I live in, and that I’m exposed to being in the music industry. And, yeah, just a lot of ego. And not only my ego, but I feel like the people around me.

“So, not to like call anyone out necessarily, but I am very sensitive to my own ego, and how leaning into it has betrayed me very deeply in the past. And having to come to terms with why I even had this ego – and all this goes back to childhood trauma.

“That song for me is not necessarily like ridding myself of ego completely but definitely coming to terms with everything. All my issues really just sort of always relate back to early trauma and it’s part of my story. Well, now I try to move very much with a lot less ego you could say. Almost none,” he smiles with evident self-awareness.

Nice cover, because in a sense Demons found its musical origins in ego if that’s not too strong a word to express the widely-shared desire to look sharp clothing-wise. Having never started his music in a similar scenario before Zee finds it a pretty amusing story himself.

“Yeah, it always interests me when I think back to how that song came about because I’m always inspired by everything like film and by other music and things like travelling and meeting people, but this is the one and only time I’ve ever been inspired by clothing!

“There’s a really cool clothing brand that’s based in Auckland called Beach Brains, and they had a pop-up shop one day where they were selling off all their test items really cheap. So I went and bought a bunch of clothes, and they’re all in this very like surf rock, beachy, sort of like, ‘yeah dude’ world. And I went home and put on all the clothes, and I was just like, ‘Man I’m totally like a ‘70s rocker dude!’

“I was looking in the mirror and I just I felt the energy to make a filthy guitar riff and just go real punky with it! And so the clothes kind of inspired me. They actually acted as a catalyst for that energy and then slowly but surely, it turned into what it turned into.

“It started with the guitar riff. And I think I just like had that initial ‘I’m pulling away’ melody, and it just sort of like wrote itself…”