TEED on Selling Gear, Sobriety, and Embracing the Discipline

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Let's get down to business: Orlando Higginbottom's got a great new TEED record out this Friday, Always With Me, and as someone who's followed his career since the early Greco-Roman singles as well as his stellar 2012 debut Trouble it's been a thrill to hear his songwriting and production style progress and mature. (If you've checked out SG Lewis' collab EP with Tove Lo last year, or the most recent Nelly Furtado record, you've also heard Orlando's particular touch.) I had a great time hopping on the phone with him a few weeks ago to talk about all things the new record and much more, check it out:

This latest record came together quicker than the last. Walk me through that.
The previous one was incredibly hard to make. Having completed that saga, which was entirely personal, a lot of weight left my shoulders and I was able to approach this one with less self-involvement and more lightness. I started thinking about it whilst I was doing the last live show. I'm always making music—it's a kind of constant practice for me—and in the last year, it all started to actually come together. There was a lot of time where it was just lists of songs on my wall. I write songs, write down the titles, and keep making more things. Six months later, I go through and listen to 100 tracks and I'm like, "That one's kind of interesting, I can see a pattern." I'm always looking for something that feels authentic and sincere, and sometimes that's not what I make when I sit down. It's me trying my hand at something that's someone else's sound. When I listen back, I'm able to hear what's genuine, and those are the songs that begin to coalesce into a record.

I'm curious to hear you expand on that notion of being sincere to yourself, which factors into quality control to varying degrees for people when it comes to the creative process.
It's a really tricky thing to talk about, because sometimes there's very practical examples within electronic music. We have certain sonic flagpoles—sounds that attach immediate cultural meaning to a song, like the 909 drum machine, a 2step UK garage beat, or an Amen break. However you use them, they immediately mean something to the listener. Sometimes, I find myself using a production technique that feels close to fetishization of a genre, and that's not sincere. At the same time, there might be a moment where I'm like, "Yes, I do want to make a deep house record," and making a deep house record includes using certain tropes of the genre.

The lyrics, the emotion of the song, obviously has to be sincere. There's an interesting line before something is corny, and when I cross over into the corny corny side of that line—it's not that I'm losing the sincerity, we all have our different barometers of how to sense that, but I waffle on about that for a long time. I'm nowhere near the end of my journey with it, really. I'm very much at square two.

Talk to me more about tracing the evolution of your sound. Even though you came up at a point in which there were several distinct trends going on in electronic music, you've always scanned to me as similar to Hot Chip in terms of your approach to electronic pop.
I'm slightly contrarian to trends, which scan to me as conformity. I try to follow what feels fresh to me, and that's taken me on an interesting journey. I hope that what I'm doing is refining my sound. With this record, I was trying to make up for the swampiness of the last one, and a lot of artists apologize for the last album they've made. That's how I feel a little bit about this record: It's correcting the wrongs of that album, which was very dense and heavy emotionally—"Look at me, woe is me," that kind of thing.

I wanted to do something less self-involved. I'm aware that I can make things overly musical, so trying to strip it back—that's the dream, the holy grail for someone like me. My habit is to make things dense and protect myself with intricacies, so this record was about trying to make something that's light on its feet.

On the last record, you explored a few fairly personal themes, including post-pandemic feelings and sobriety. You mentioned feeling the need to apologize for that record. Do you feel vulnerable about having put yourself out there?
I'm always feeling a bit. It's become a weird constant, because of the pressure of social media and the nature of the music industry. The people who are often successful spin a very good web of tricking the audience into thinking they're best friends with them, and I don't like that. I'm trying to do things that are honest. But that honesty doesn't really fit very well with this world, and sometimes I do feel like I've overexposed myself. But I'm certainly very happy to talk about things like sobriety—that doesn't feel like overexposure. It's hard to put my finger on it. Sometimes it's like, "Oh my God, I can't believe I wrote that song about heartbreak and didn't tune my vocals properly." But there's always an impulse to keep going. I feel like it's important work, so I keep doing it.

How long have you been sober?
Coming up on four years now.

Congratulations. I quit drinking about four and a half years ago myself. For me, it's something where I don't even really recognize my past self that loved drinking, which is kind of strange and eerie. I'm curious to hear how that's been for you.
It definitely changed my life for the better. I probably wouldn't have got that second album out without stopping. Also, when it comes to touring, it's almost a necessity. I honestly probably should've done it a couple of years earlier, but once you clear 35, I noticed that a lot of people do it because you can't party and tour at the same time. It's just not possible. It also removes some of the base level anxiety that exists because of having alcohol in your system. There's so much stressful stuff going on, and this game of being a musician is very difficult and strange, and not very friendly. If I was having a couple of bad hangovers a month on top of that, there would be some real moments of crisis. Without that, I'm able to stay walking the path, so it really felt like a necessity. But I do miss some of the good wild stuff. Obviously, there's bad wild stuff that I don't miss—but the good partying, of course I had an amazing time.

I can definitely relate there. You and I are about the same age, and it's funny, because it is around 35 where, if you're somebody who's in or adjacent to the entertainment industries and you have the propensity to go really hard, it's a bit of a "Put up or shut up" moment when it comes to getting clean.
Yeah, and it changes relationships a lot. A lot of the first connections you make—and I'm sure it's the same for you—involve getting wasted with people and connecting at 4 a.m., or being silly at an airport. That's where you build some lifelong bonds, allies, and friends—and then, you just don't have that anymore. There's no version of with people who are partying when you're sober, because you're no longer heroically seeing the dawn with people. So making those connections at this point is a very different thing. It's actually harder, and yet it's built on something that's more real than just the heroics of partying—the feeling that we conquered the night. With other musicians, it's about the shared nonsense and trauma of the music industry now.

Let's talk more about your own experiences with and perspectives of the music industry in general.
This is where I think I could write a book, and I'm not being facetious. When I signed to Polydor for my first album, they asked me at the end of a meeting, "So, should we put this on Spotify?" It just wasn't even a thing. Six months later, we looked at Spotify, and I was like, "Oh, people are listening to the music on Spotify. That's interesting." There were completely different barometers to a record being successful or not. The main thing back then was Radio 1 playing it. I was very colored by that experience, and there are still some voices in my head when I'm finishing music that are always saying, "Well, is Radio 1 gonna play this?" There was press, in a really nice way. There were so many magazines and journalists. The press could actually move the needle, shape a fanbase, and create interest, and that was a really important factor.

I definitely had some lost years. I think that a lot of people were kind of lost in between, like, 2015 to 2018—a lot of my peers in electronic music. I'm not going to name names, but people I came up with who also didn't really release any music then. There was a bit of, "Well, what is this?" We had a peak social media era where social media was kind of amazing—and it worked in our benefit, as did the DSPs. If you knew how to use these things in a healthy way, it would be beneficial for you. There was a nice community online, and the Spotify's and the Apple's were really trying to onboard everybody. They were actually very friendly, even though they've got a lot of bad press.

That was a good time, from 2018 to 2022—and now I feel like we're really in a tailspin. I'm definitely a believer in the dead internet theory, in that I think very few people are really online. There's a huge amount of fake fan accounts and fake drama, as well as companies that you pay to create 2025-style intrigue about your project and juice the algorithm with Cameron Winter memes or whatever. That's all pretty toxic. The way to get attention now is to write mean things, right? It's really unhealthy.

There's very little music press left, obviously, and on top of that, the DSPs are no longer friendly. They flipped the script, it's harder to get streams, they're paying even less, and they're all getting into bed with AI. This is the most unfriendly period of the music industry I've ever released a record in, and I don't know what to do about it other than keep releasing music and try to do smart business deals in the way that I structure my business. But everybody finds this moment to be dizzyingly weird and hard to navigate.

How do you separate the business anxieties from the creative drive?
Sometimes, not very well. I think I allow that voice to come in too much—"Os this going to be a commercial success?" Obviously, when I look back through my catalog, the tracks that have really done well over time have come out of pure creetive impulses, so it never benefits me to think, "I'm gonna compromise and edit this vocal so it's a bit nicer for the radio." That always backfires, but I still make that mistake. Conversely, when you sit down and make a song in a concentrated way, you go a little bit mad and down a rabbit hole that's unpredictable. There's so many factors that start coming in there—inner critics, inner fantasists. The music industry element is just one of many factors tugging you around the place.

I sympathize with the people who are like, "If this one doesn't work, who knows what will happen." One of the things I've done with my career to make sure that I can get through this is turning up the amount of writing and production work I do for other people and writing with other people, which is a deliberate thing to spread myself out a bit and not put everything on the artist project. If all my rent was counting on my artist project, maybe I wouldn't have gotten through through.

Talk to me more about the nature of collaboration and working on others' music.
I'm incredibly grateful for it. It's like putting oil on the cogs—my ego is not in the room. I'm able to just think about serving the artist and getting to where they want to go. Obviously, I have a certain flavor that I'm bringing, so my voice does come through. But that's just the by-and-by. Like, I'm not trying to do that. But it's lovely to step away from the personalness of things and just be a musician that has a function um—and the function is the greater goal of the art. Then, when I return to my own music, I have a certain clarity. I can walk into a studio when I'm working on someone else's music and say, "We don't need that middle eight, we don't need that vocal chop, we don't need the guitar." I can strip the track back from all the nonsense in two minutes. Normally, when I'm working on my own music, that'll take six months to come to that conclusion.

When I'm in the practice of clear editing and direction—really trusting my taste and knowledge—I can then bring that into my own work. When I'm working on other people's stuff, I feel very effective as a producer and songwriter. It's practice. People don't like the word "discipline," but I love it. It's a discipline, being a musician. Taking out the artist for a second and just being the practitioner is awesome.

The press release mentioned writing this record on one synth. Unpack that for me.
The quick version of the story is that, during the pandemic, I wasn't making any money at all. I moved house and I sold almost all my equipment, and that was obviously a horrible process. As a side note, I don't think any of us talk about the pandemic enough. I think we need to talk about those years because so much happened.

You are singing my tune, man. I am saying this all the time to people.
It's fascinating, it's important, and we're still obviously recovering from it. So I didn't want to buy more equipment, because buying more equipment meant possibly having to go through that process of selling it again—and I still live pretty light. If I needed to pack my house up in 24 hours, I could. But I love synths, so I borrowed a friend's Virus TI, a classic classic synthesizer associated with late '90s-early 2000s drum and bass. It's not what I would usually choose. I imagine most people would think I'd get a Prophet, or something a bit more warm and classic for my sound—but 80% of the keyboards and synth sounds on the album are from the Virus TI.

When I sit down and I'm trying to get something out of a piece of gear, it has its limitations—and I'm not very technical-minded. You can put me in the same bracket as the layperson. When it comes to programming a synthesizer, if there's four steps to make a sound, I'll stop. I've had enough. I'm not going to go down a big programming rabbit hole. So I end up with sounds where I'll have something in mind and I won't quite get there, but I'll use it anyway. That gives things a character. Obviously, on my laptop, I have all the plugins, but I'm much more drawn to using something I can play and record as audio.

I have rules that will go on my studio wall behind the computer, but they're not strict—they're more poetic. One of them that was on my wall for this whole album process was no '80s drums. People would come in the studio and be like, "What the fuck? Why have you got that there?" But it's really useful to me just to make sure that I'm actually pushing myself to try and find a new-ish sound for me and not be lazy.