DJ-Kicks: TEED

Speak to Orlando Higginbottom, AKA TEED, about his decades-long relationship with electronic music and words like "love," obsession" and "addiction" soon litter the conversation. Born into a musical family—his father is an esteemed organist and choirmaster—the British artist spent his early years becoming both a classically trained pianist and singer, and a jungle and drum & bass fanatic. He'd often skip school to be first in line to nab the latest promos at his local record shop in Oxford.

After years of bedroom tinkering, his sharp ear and all-consuming passion bore fruit, with releases on popular 2000s labels like Greco-Roman, Play It Down and later Polydor. By then, of course, he was Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs—a project that began as a private joke, and definitely wasn't meant to last beyond a couple MySpace uploads. But it blew up, and soon he was taking his brand of vocal dance pop to clubs and festivals the world over.

Los Angeles was always a popular stop on tour, and in 2015 he made the bold decision to move there full-time. For more than a decade, the City of Angels has been his home and place of work, where he's developed into a full-blown studio producer as well as a solo artist. It's also where he's discovered a different kind of nightlife: new sounds, tempos, energies. Indeed, LA acts as a kind of muse on his long-awaited DJ-Kicks, which sparkles with all the colour and charisma of a Californian sunset. Or, more accurately, the pre-game before a big night Downtown.

"I was thinking a lot about what Americans call 'pre-gaming,' which is such a funny phrase," he explained. "It's that feeling of putting on a fun mix before you go out, while you're getting ready and having a drink. That was my flag in the ground in my head while I was making it; how I imagined people would listen to it."

This carefree vibe dominates the mix, which after a short beatless intro dives head first into a pumping house bassline. That track, "Everybody" by Casino Times, is one of several exclusives, alongside tunes by Joe Goddard, Austin Ato, Jacques Greene and Oscar Farrell. According to TEED, he knew instinctively that he didn't want a mix that took "seven tracks to get going." In preparation, he relistened to a bunch of classic DJ-Kicks—Tiga, Erlend Øye, Honey Dijon—and quickly realised that big, soulful and house-y was the way to go.

"I wanted to do something uptempo and clubby," he added. "I felt very strongly about that straight away. I just want people to put it on and have a good dance."

The mix shows TEED’s ability to balance big-room appeal with nuance. There are plenty of vocal tracks, starting with a fresh version of TEED's own 2022 hit "Never Seen You Dance." That and "Persuasion" were "fully reproduced" for the project, given new intros and outros, drums, basslines and even tempos. He also, true to DJ-Kicks lore, covered KC and The Sunshine Band's 1979 funk smash "Please Don't Go." Other vocal cameos include Hercules & Love Affair, Seven Davis Jr. and K.T. Brooks on the wonderfully uplifting "How Do I Let Go" by Dennis Ferrer, a track TEED wanted to include right from the start. With his next exclusive track “Another Day”, TEED provides one of the deeper, mysterious and introspectively soulful moments on the release.

Moving into the latter part of the mix the energy sources flicker, the synths get heavier and the drums turn crunchier. House unfurls into proggier vistas, even touching on trance. His own track “Under The Metal” provides a rolling cerebral and hypnotic groove, inflected with an arpeggiating euphoric breakdown which melts away. The shift happens so subtly you barely notice, until suddenly you're subsumed in a kind of psychedelic fog. "I like that it gets quite woozy and trippy, and I love that DHS record at the end," he said.

For the closing track, TEED leans on Malibu's "Spicy City," a slice of warped vocal ambient from the French artist's acclaimed 2025 album, Vanities. Its church-like tones evoke TEED's early childhood as a choirboy, laying bare the full extent of his rich sonic influences. The final notes sound like waves lapping at a shore. "It gets sort of dreamy," TEED explained, "as if you're drifting off into the sky." There in lays the magic of the mix, much like those long nights out when moments unfold and transform before our very ears and eyes, DJ-Kicks: TEED seamlessly moves us between experience and memory, desert and oasis, compelling us to search for those mystical moments where experience crystalises, before vanishing into the hills of a warm LA evening.