Thunder strikes

WILD NIGHTS Thunderheist’s rise to the top has been one fast roller-coaster ride.

Photo: May Truong

“I blame it all on Jack Daniel’s,” quips Isis Salam before we finish asking about her no-holds-barred stage presence. “I don’t remember any of it,” she adds, laughing. There’s no shying away from the palpable energy of this 23-year-old, Toronto-based firecracker, the frontwoman for Canadian electro-rap sensation Thunderheist.

“I’m remembering way more from shows these days,” she continues. “We’ve been touring a lot, so I haven’t been able to stick to my old ways.” The old ways she’s referring to? Press and fans alike have had a field day describing the countless antics of duo Salam and 32-year-old Montreal producer Grahm Zilla—including stage diving, crowd surfing and bottles of Jack poured on the front row.

Thunderheist’s brash mix of buzz-saw electro, booty-clapping drum programming and Salam’s sexed-up, Kid Sister–like flow hit the Web in 2006. Since then, Thunderheist hasn’t stopped touring; the duo released a full-length, self-titled album last month.

The whole thing came together around one fortuitous—and accidental—instant message. A onetime video-game programmer for Ubisoft, Zilla was moonlighting as an abstract beat producer when he met Salam. “I was on the Flying Lotus tip,” he says of his solo work. “The job was killing me, so I was making really moody, stoner beats.” Eventually, Zilla quit the grind and connected with Salam via a mutual friend. They made plans to collaborate on her solo work, which has more of a contemporary, conscious hip-hop vibe.

“I wasn’t really telling anybody about this other stuff,” Zilla says of a few production experiments that would later become Thunderheist’s first singles. “I certainly didn’t tell Isis! I thought I’d get clowned on.” One day, he shared snippets of this side project with a friend and accidentally dropped one of his tracks—a production for a Spank Rock remix competition—into an instant-message conversation with Salam, not the intended recipient. “I thought, Oh, God, that’s it. She’ll think I’m a freak. She’ll never want to work with me again,” he recalls, anticipating that his more jacking sound would be outside her comfort zone. “She came back online a couple days later and asked me what it was. She loved it.”

The two began trading beats and a cappellas, resulting in the massive Internet sensation “Jerk It.” “Labels today don’t really want you unless you’ve proven that you can sell,” Salam says. “Our success online really showed them we’re bankable.” While Zilla’s initial remix didn’t win, the Internet buzz got the band signed to Spank Rock’s label, Ninja Tune offshoot Big Dada, after all.

Though pleased with their speedy ascension, they have their reservations. “These kids, man, they move fast,” Salam says of the short attention span that comes with Web-based stardom. Zilla adds, “Because it went off so quickly and we rely on our music to live, we whored ourselves out gigging.”

Now, Zilla and Salam are hard at work on new material focusing more on Salam’s singing while Zilla continues to push the envelope of his productions, which includes the addition of a drummer on their current U.S. tour. “The shelf life for groups can be much shorter when people blow up too quickly,” Zilla says. “We almost fell victim to that. You get consumed with traveling and partying. After a while you’re like, ‘I just wanna make music, what the fuck?’”

Thunderheist plays Schubas Saturday 27.

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