While making their new album, the gentlemen of Zeds Dead put a whiteboard in the studio to jot ideas on while they worked, a go-to move for anyone in a creative swirl. What was unique about their notes however, is that they ultimately wrote just one: “F–k s–t up.”
“That was the only thing on the board,” says the duo’s Dylan Mamid.
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03/18/2025However concise, the instruction contained the project’s foundational approach — “to sound like, kind of not clean,” says other half Zachary Rapp-Rovan, “just very glitchy and messed with, but cohesive, but kind of chaotic.”
You’re forgiven if these guidelines sound confusing to you. But with the Zeds Dead skillset, honed over a 16-year career that contains a debut LP, multiple mixtapes, hundreds of singles and remixes and countless shows, the duo made its excellent second album, Return to the Spectrum of Intergalactic Happiness. Released in March, the 14-track project does sound simultaneously disorderly and controlled, at once bursting at the seams and laced with moments of contemplative chill.
Meeting with Billboard at a studio in L.A., Mamid and Rapp-Rovan are both relaxed and thoughtful as they take a break from prepping a live show to talk about life, music and the evolution of a dubstep genre that they’re fairly sure they don’t actually exist within.
“We’re never really going for a genre,” says Rapp-Rovan. “Dubstep and all these bass genres are just kind of things we dabble in. We have our fans, more so than being a genre-affiliated artist.”
Roughly 40,000 of these fans are trekking to Red Rocks this week for Dead Rocks, Zeds Dead’s standing engagement at the Colorado amphitheater that’s happened every summer since 2014. (Although the 2020 event was cancelled due to the pandemic.) Today (July 3) is the second of Dead Rocks 2025’s two-night run, with the duo headlining each evening after a supporting lineup featuring 10 bass and bass-adjacent artists. (Zeds Dead will also play three shows in Denver on July 4 — two sets at Mission Ballroom and a preceding “Backyard Jamboree” at Civic Center Park where fans can enjoy music and a hot dog eating contest.)
Each Dead Rocks is surely special, but this year is especially so given that it’s the first time since 2016 that the duo — who’s built a sprawling fanbase with its hard, experimental and often heady bass music — has come to Dead Rocks with a new album to play. If some of it does sound familiar, however, you aren’t losing your mind.
“A lot of the things that ended up on the album started with our other pieces of music,” says Rapp-Rovan. “It almost became remixing something of ours again and again, until there would be different pieces from these old songs that ended up in the new ones.” In a process one could indeed reasonably call “f–king s–t up” the pair remixed this older material “until it was pretty far from the original idea.”
This process started two years ago, when the two “cleared the runway,” as Mamid puts it, of their other projects so they could focus on an LP. Often producing while on the road, the pair recorded in studios from Boise to San Francisco to Toronto to Los Angeles, then in early 2024 rented a work/live space in Joshua Tree, Calif. This remote desert location proves popular among musicians — Mamid says “isolation was the main draw.”
Along the way, they landed on a concept both beyond and complimentary to cohesive chaos. Return to the Spectrum of Intergalactic Happiness isn’t just a vibey mouthful of a title, but the name for the cosmic TV/radio station the album is meant to function as. As such, the project weaves in bits of cultural ephemera familiar to most ’80s and ’90s babies (both of the guys made their debut on Earth in ’88), including dialogue from Scarface (“what a bunch of f–kin a–holes” Al Pacino’s Tony Montana declares on “Bad Guy”), a vintage news report on the Big Bang and The NeverEnding Story, the 1984 kids fantasy film that bent the brains of a generation. (“Why is it so dark?” the movie’s hero Bastian asks in the first words heard on the album. “In the beginning,” The Childlike Empress responds, “it is always dark.”)
In this way, the album collapses the space-time continuum, functioning in the same way as one’s own brain by serving up seemingly random and disparate memories at once. The late Duke Ellington is heard in a 1965 interview with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation on “A Million Dreams,” a sample that “we almost had to cut,” says Rapp-Rovan. “That would have sucked, because we really felt like that was an important piece of the album.” The dialogue was fortunately cleared at the last minute after the song found its way to Ellington’s grandson, who liked it.
Meanwhile, George and Ira Gershwin are credited on “One of These Mornings,” which features a sample of Ella Fitzgerald singing “Summertime” from 1959’s Porgy & Bess. All of these bits and bobs live inside productions that balance bass wobble with kaleidoscopic synths with deep emotion and big ideas. The album’s cover, a picture of rainbow that Rapp-Rovan took in the middle of the night while on a 2017 mid-summer trip to Iceland, effectively summarizes the vibe in total.
On its surface, the album is a contribution to the bass/dubstep scene in which Zeds Dead has long existed. However, the reality of where they live in the spectrum of electronic music is arguably more nuanced. When the duo broke through in 2009, American and North American style dubstep was beginning its moment of ubiquity, as artists like Skrillex and Excison delivered sharp, heavy iterations of the U.K.-born sound and countless DJs became a drop jockeys trying to out-pummel the last.
“With dubstep, one of the things that happened was that somebody would come with a new sound that was even harder,” says Rapp-Rovan.
“There was a lot of one-upping, for sure,” says Mamid.
“Then suddenly, you’d notice that people wanted that,” says Rapp-Rovan. “More artists would be like, ‘Oh, this is what people want, so I’m going to make that,’ and then the music becomes homogeneous… And sometimes you can get addicted to the instant gratification in dance music — when you’re playing other people’s records, especially — and it’s like, ‘I can always play this one and people are gonna go crazy.”
“There have definitely been a lot of times when we’d be playing after somebody who was doing stuff that was really, really hard,” he continues. “And we’d be like, ‘I don’t want to try to one-up this guy,’ so we would just kind of bring it back down for a while and suffer… But if we took it down for a while, it would make songs that aren’t as crazy more impactful.”
Whatever they’re doing works. Over 15 years, the duo has been a more or less ubiquitous presence on the North American circuit and Dead Rocks has sold out every year for a decade. Between 2021 and 2024, it grossed $4.7 million and sold 76,300 tickets, according to numbers reported to Billboard Boxscore. The two agree that touring so extensively over the years and “trying really hard and putting a lot of effort into our shows,” says Rapp-Rovan, has created a diehard fanbase, among which it’s common for people to have seen dozens of shows over the years.
“We’ve managed to build this incredibly loyal fanbase that cares what we do,” says Mamid. “They’ll follow us to shows, especially in North America. That’s been really great for us, and it’s allowed us to exist outside of the trends of the moment.”
As such, at least for the time being, they don’t see a reason to tour outside North America. “We sort of choose not to,” says Rapp-Rovan. “We consistently get a lot of offers in North America and we don’t want to be flying all around.”
“We’ve been doing this for 15 years, and we hit it pretty hard earlier in our career, and we’re getting older,” says Mamid, who also has other business to tend to as he recently bought a house and got engaged. And even eschewing long haul flights, the two have been plenty busy. Their 2025 shows thusfar have included Coachella, Electric Forest and many standalone sets, with shows at Elements, North Coast, Austin City Limits and Hulaween on the calendar through November — and a lot more f–king s–t up to do in preparation.
“I feel like that’s one of the reasons that our album took so long, because there’s so much energy put into the shows,” says Rapp-Rovan. “Each of those Red Rocks events over the years, that’s like an album’s worth of work.”
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