TEED on new album Always With Me, his 10-year hiatus, and big tech

“There's always a tinge of self-consciousness and humiliation involved [in releasing music],” electronic artist TEED (Orlando Higginbottom) says from a conference chair at The FADER offices. It’s TEED’s album release day, hence the jitters. “It's like, ‘Really, am I doing this again?’” He is.

Today, December 5, Higginbottom dropped Always With Me, an 11-track album of sunny yet melancholic dance music that finds Higginbottom on a notable upswing from 2022’s heart-heavy When The Lights Go. His nerves, he says, stem from him feeling “cringe” about releasing a new record, something he knows will cause people to project ideas onto him and his music. Over a decade into his career, that’s still something he can’t shake. “One of the fears would be that people think that a record is a definition,” he says. “Of course it's not for any artist.”

The electronic music heavyweight, who went by Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs before changing his name this year, broke out at 25 with 2012’s Trouble, an album that peaked at No. 2 on the U.K. Dance Albums Chart and became an indelible part of many millennials’ musical makeup. But what should have been the start of a prolific period of new releases stumbled into a long hiatus when Higginbottom wouldn’t release his next album until 2022, ten years later.

There were a number of reasons for the hiatus: “Personal mountains I needed to climb,” he says, plus the sudden rise of a new social media musical culture and the dispiriting reality of the music business. 2022’s When The Lights Go was his aching explanation for his long silent period. However his new album, Always With Me, is a concerted move towards something lighter, he says.

Listening to the record you hear a multiplicity; a sunny sadness, a dancing heart-ache, a sense of searching. It’s the same emotionally fraught danceability that brought listeners to Higginbottom nearly 15 years ago.

Ahead, TEED talks to The FADER about his memories from Trouble, social media’s impact on dance music, and his newest record, Always With Me.

The FADER: When you came out in 2012 with Trouble, that was a very earnest, maybe more optimistic time culturally. I was a child, but I have these vague memories of hipster, Coachella, sunshine, low-interest rates, Obama-era … How would you describe that era in music?

TEED: The important factor was none of it happened with phones or cameras around. I started an Instagram page a month before my first album, Trouble, came out. We were like, "Should we put it on Spotify? We don't have to." It was a completely different landscape. None of the shows would have been the same if everyone had their phones out, even if it was for one song. Performances wouldn’t have been the same. Not having cameras pointed at us and not being recorded made it all so much more free, goofy and smelly. I had a show where I dressed up in goofy outfits and I had dancers who did costume changes. They were my friends, but they weren't professional dancers. It wasn't a slick show. And that was fine, and everyone loved it. To me the phones are the factor.

Was the creep of social media and the rise of audiences having cameras part of the reason for the 10 years between your first and second record?

In hindsight I can see that [it was]. Everything suddenly felt more pressurized. There were these metrics coming back at you. That felt like a good thing at the time. "Oh, wow. I can see how many people are listening now. I can see how many people like this post. A picture of my face does better than a picture of a landscape. Interesting. We'll post more of my face.” Suddenly you're thinking about your face a lot.

We all got trained. Meta onboarded culture. We got on their ship. They didn't get on our ship. It's the same with Spotify. They got everyone onto their game. “This is the release schedule. This is how you get lots of streams. This is the length of a song."

You were signed to Polydor for your first project, which was commercially and critically successful. Do you think making money as an artist was more straightforward and feasible at that time, because it was before streaming?

No. That's always been a problem. The difference is touring was easier and cheaper then. I was [25]. I was thinking about what I was doing next week. I wasn't thinking, "How am I ever going to be able to have a house?" That just changes as you get older. To be frank with you, my Universal [Polydor] deal is still unrecouped. I owe them money. I don't have a spare 20 grand to audit them, but I've never been paid for that record and I'll never own it.

Do you still have a close relationship with that music from 2012?

When the record was released in 2012, I was pretty unaware of what was happening. I didn't know that [my album] was super successful. I didn't know that lots of people loved it. I didn't understand that that was a possibility. I should have pushed on faster and harder at that time, but I found the whole thing so overwhelming, weird and discombobulating that I stepped back. I always felt like people came to my shows by mistake. I don't think it's imposter syndrome. I think it's something else: not knowing how to accept the love. It's taken me a long time to look back at that and be like, "Oh, people really connected with it. People really enjoyed it. It was a little moment."

You moved from the U.K. to Los Angeles after finding that early success. Why?

I was in L.A. a lot in 2014 and 2013, and I loved it. I found it romantic, mysterious and cheap, believe it or not. There's a cliché about L.A. that it's socially alienating, that it takes people a long time to find their people. In my book that’s a good thing. Artists can disappear into their own world there. It's great if you have the discipline. I loved it.

You're describing this positive experience in L.A., but I'm thinking about the record you released from that time, When The Lights Go …

Oh, well, I had some bad times. That was probably the lowest point in my life, but I wouldn't have changed being there for anything.

You’ve described the new record as an upswing from the last album, in terms of where you're at. Tell me more about that?

The target with this album was to make something for the club, which didn't end up happening. [But] it’s light on its feet, more hopeful and more stripped back production-wise. There are less counter melodies and it’s less dense. The subject matter is more hopeful. There's no "I'm sad and depressed" songs on this record, because I haven't been sad and depressed. I'm not even really writing that much about direct romantic love in the same way. There's a crush song and there's a love song at the beginning of this album, but there's a lot of songs about friendship and there's a lot of songs about the world, self-realization and continuing life. I sort of achieved the upswing.

Why “sort of?”

Because I still have an impulse to make an even lighter record. I have conversations with friends where we're like, "Oh my God, [the music industry] is so fucking hard … I just toured for a month. I didn't make any money. Nobody's listening to my record." But we're all like, "But is everyone making music?" And everyone's like, "Yes, we are making music." It's so lovely. The grounding factor is that we want to carry on.

Why do you think that is?

The power of music. Music is amazing. The AI and tech overlords subconsciously know that music is incredibly powerful. They know that art is God. And they don't like it, because they want to be God and they don't understand art.

It's going to sound conspiratorial the way I'm saying it, but they want to devalue this thing because it's amazing, humanizing and beautiful … because it's way more important than anything they can offer us. It's like Republicans in national parks. They hate that the mountain is big and strong, stunning and otherworldly, untouchable and unclimbable. They'd rather it wasn't that.