Dan Avidan

Dan Avidan began pursuing music professionally during his college years in the late 1990s. After years of practice and underground gigs, he began his first official music venture in 2002 with the Philadelphia-based shoegaze band The Northern Hues.  Several years of touring followed, though the group eventually disbanded due to musical differences following the release of their self-titled EP in 2004.  

Dan moved to New York City to work on his next project, the downtempo synth-heavy Skyhill. This group proved to be more creatively fulfilling, but failed to find much success outside of the underground Brooklyn music scene. Disheartened by a decade of time and energy put into music with few tangible results, Dan took a year off from songwriting and began studying comedy at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre in Chelsea. Here he met Brian Wecht, who would become his main musical partner for the next 15 years (and counting!). 

Brian and Dan started a musical comedy group called Ninja Sex Party that immediately gained traction on the local circuit. The group then exploded in popularity in 2013 when Dan moved to Los Angeles and joined the already-established YouTube comedy show Game Grumps. In the decade since, Ninja Sex Party, along with Dan and Brian’s second comedy band, Starbomb, have released 13 albums and garnered over 400 million YouTube views and hundreds of millions of plays on Spotify. Ninja Sex Party’s albums have also found Billboard chart-topping success, with the band being crowned the #1 selling comedy act of 2018.

While Dan felt extremely grateful for this turn of events, he still had one unfulfilled career goal, which was to create music in a non-comedic rock band. This desire was the genesis of Shadow Academy, which Dan formed in 2020 with his friend and Emmy-winning producer Jim Roach. Channeling their creative energies during the long pandemic of the past few years, Jim and Dan have created a self-titled album that they are enormously proud of. 

“This is the last piece of the puzzle for me,” says Dan. “It’s an amazing feeling to express another side of myself through these songs. Getting to be involved with these various projects is all I’ve ever wanted out of a career in music. I’ll never take it for granted.”