"Tech wants to devalue music because it's humanizing and beautiful"
"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.