Prehistoric to present: The evolution of TEED

TEED takes on Beyond The Valley this New Year

If you’ve spent any time lost in the glow of a dancefloor, chances are the pulse you were moving to had the fingerprints of Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs all over it. The moniker for British-born, US-based producer, musician and DJ Orlando Higginbottom, Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs became one of electronic music’s most quietly powerful forces — a two-time GRAMMY nominee, a trusted studio co-pilot for BANKS, The Blessed Madonna, SG Lewis and Mark Ronson, and a festival fixture from Coachella to Glastonbury to Red Rocks. His debut album Trouble rewired the genre back in 2012, and after a decade-long disappearance (the kind fuelled by creativity but cursed by hard drives), he resurfaced with the lauded sophomore LP When the Lights Go (2022). Now, Higginbottom is ditching the dinosaur bones and stepping into a sleek new era under the acronym TEED — and the rebrand comes with a whole new body of work to match.

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“The name adjustment, which is how I’m seeing it in my head, feels really nice just to freshen up the project and shake away a few of the things I felt like I wasn’t really attached to anymore. I think people want to do that all the time with projects and you can’t but sometimes you need to allow yourself to let go of something. I feel lighter because of it,” explains Higginbottom.

The first offering in this shiny TEED chapter is all about evolution. Always With Me — arriving 5 December via his own label, Nice Age — taps into the hazy magic of memory. Think sunburnt French summer holidays, first crushes, the thrill of freedom, the sting of loneliness, and that infamous end-of-trip melancholy. It’s TEED at his most emotionally open, weaving a two-part narrative: the first half circling love, longing and desire, the second sinking deeper into self-awareness and the emotional patterns that trail into adulthood. This isn’t nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake — it’s an excavation of what those early feelings leave behind and how they keep echoing long after the sunscreen fades.

“That’s what ended up coming out and that was the atmosphere that I was drawing from. I think I’ve reached a point where I’m slightly less self-involved as a person, which is just maturing and growing up. It’s less about your own shit. There’s a wider perspective and I’m less interested in singing about my feelings in the present and being like “I want you to know about this sad feeling” – that doesn’t interest me in the same way it did with the last album,” he says.

 

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“It’s continuing to grow up as it were and it was nice examining emotions in a different way. It was about thinking about how these things appeared in my life. Big emotional themes that we have – the first moment I felt them. Why does it have this colour, why does it have this tone, how come that tone and that feeling is still the same. Like a crush is still a crush. It’s never a direct line of, “this is what I’m thinking about so I’m going to write a song about it”. It’s this vague area that I’m exploring. Feeling about it makes me feel a certain way – I’m going to write a song about it and it folds back into itself.”

This glowing, introspective record sees TEED stripping things back and leaning into emotional honesty — but with discipline. Real, literal discipline. Higginbottom built the album using strict personal rules and boundaries, a creative constraint system that would make even the most fastidious producers raise an impressed eyebrow.

“I’m a big fan of restrictions, full stop. Whether it’s an instrument thing or a tool thing. Behind my computer is a big white wall and when I was making the album it was covered in note of rules,” he says. “The rules push me to explore a bit further.”

And for Australian fans, it’s dropping at the perfect moment. TEED is ringing in the new year at Beyond The Valley — a long-awaited return after nearly a decade away from Aussie soil.

“It’s really nice to come back to Australia after many years, especially over New Years. I have so many great memories of coming over many years ago now over New Year so I’m really excited for it,” he says. 

“I’m excited to see where the Australian festival crowd is at – what is the mood, what is the vibe there, what’s going on, what’s the culture.”

That’s your cue to bring your best to Beyond The Valley, especially as TEED comes armed with Always With Me. TEED isn’t just tweaking a moniker — he’s cracking open a whole new chapter and Australian audiences are privileged to witness it firsthand.

Keep up to date with TEED here.