Zeds Dead

Bassmentality, and a line from Pulp Fiction

Dylan Mamid and Zachary Rapp-Rovan met in Toronto in 2004 through mutual friends and made hip-hop instrumentals together as Mass Productions before renaming themselves after a line of Bruce Willis dialogue in Pulp Fiction — "Zed's dead, baby" — a sample they still use to open sets. The Zeds Dead project proper dates to 2009, when they self-released a track called Journey of a Lifetime and played a first live set at The Social in Toronto.

Their leverage in those years came as much from promotion as production. Bassmentality, the weekly night they ran in Toronto from 2009 to 2013, booked Skrillex and Borgore early and gave the pair a room to test material in. The record that travelled furthest was a 2009 remix of Blue Foundation's Eyes on Fire, which a retrospective published in September 2026 still rates as the track that introduced the duo to a mass audience and one of the defining records of the early dubstep period. A 2010 remix of Flickers followed and established the cinematic streak — heavy low end under something closer to film score — that has run through the catalogue since.

Mamid produces as DC and Rapp-Rovan as Hooks, and the split has stayed stable for the whole run. Speaking in June 2026, DC put the length of it at seventeen years in the game.

The records that carry the catalogue

The EP sequence — Victor in 2012, Hot Sauce in 2013, Somewhere Else in 2014 — established a habit of crossing between dubstep, house, drum and bass and hip-hop on the same release rather than picking a lane. The video for Lost You won a 2015 MMVA for best post-production and drew a Juno nomination. Their debut album, Northern Lights, arrived in 2016 with Rivers Cuomo and Pusha T among the guests, and was the first major release on Deadbeats, the label they set up to put it out.

Between the albums, a run of collaborations did most of the load-bearing work. Samurai with Ganja White Night in 2018 showed that broadening the palette had not meant abandoning the heavier material; Save My Grave with DNMO and GG Magree in 2020 pulled in a different direction; Lost Birds, with Elliott Moss, came off the downtempo Catching Z's in 2021. Ecstasy of Soul, made with GRiZ in 2022 around an Ennio Morricone sample, started life as an intro for their back-to-back sets and turned into one of the most recognisable things they have. One Three Nine with Scrufizzer in 2023 went at UK grime.

The remix list reaches well outside the bass scene — Radiohead, Massive Attack and Billie Eilish among them — which is consistent with a duo whose whole method is crate-digging and recontextualising.

Deadbeats, the thing that outgrew them

Deadbeats launched in 2016 and turned ten in 2026. It stopped being an outlet for their own records fairly quickly: Subtronics, PEEKABOO, 1788-L and DNMO all reached wider audiences through it, and the brand now carries a radio show, the We Are Deadbeats compilations, festival takeovers and the Deadrocks events at Red Rocks. A second label, Altered States, followed in 2021.

DC described the label in June 2026 as something that "very much exists outside of us which is awesome," adding that they had not started it with large expectations.

Two albums in sixteen months

Return to the Spectrum of Intergalactic Happiness, their second album, came out through Deadbeats in March 2025. Its organising idea was a television flicking through decades, which suited the sampling but split opinion: some reviewers called it their strongest studio record, while others found it a backwards look at 2010s dubstep, with sample fragments crowding out the tracks themselves.

They went again quickly. On 2 July 2026 — the opening day of their Red Rocks weekend — the duo surprise-released a third album, Return to the Return (of the Spectrum of Intergalactic Happiness), fourteen tracks continuing the same fictional universe. CUT_ sings on In Your Head, Jem Cooke on Out of Time, Kerli appears on Fly Around The World, and Skratch Bastid cuts on Pourin Rain and Fallin Down. The sample sources run from vintage hypnosis tapes to Chopin.

Rapp-Rovan told RANGE in an interview published on 21 July 2026 that the premise is interception: "The idea is we're picking up things that are traveling through the universe. Sounds from Earth, stuff from an interview in the '60s." The title, he said, arrived in a dream and could be read as flow-state. Mamid framed the record the same way — "Everything in the universe is sort of like a spectrum. A flow of things that endlessly move." On method, the duo have said the album was made without reference to what might land best in a set. DJ Mag reviewed it; a dance-press consensus has not settled.

Where they stand, autumn 2026

On 4 March 2026 they announced Journey of a Lifetime, named for that 2009 upload: fifteen shows across twelve North American cities, mostly outdoor amphitheatres, with presale on 11 March and general sale on 12 March. One dollar per ticket goes to music education through a partnership with PLUS1. Support rotates by market — ALLEYCVT, Daily Bread, Deathpact, Dr. Fresch, Imanu, Ivy Lab, Mary Droppinz, Moody Good and Whethan are all on the bill somewhere.

The framing is explicit: this is the last major run before a year off. "It will be the grand finale of everything we've been working on," the pair said at announcement. "We'll be taking some time off in 2027 so we're going all out on production, new music, and stage design." They have called it the end of the beginning rather than a farewell, and Mamid has described the tour as a retrospective of the partnership and of the relationship with the audience.

The run opened with Deadrocks XII at Red Rocks on 2 and 3 July, with the Backyard Jamboree at Denver's Auraria Campus on 4 July and a late Mission Ballroom show where they went back-to-back with Of The Trees; more than 30,000 tickets were sold across the four events. The Forest Hills Stadium date in Queens slipped from 18 July to 14 August because of weather. Mesa Amphitheater took two nights on 18 and 19 September. Two shows at Gloria Molina Grand Park in Los Angeles on 2 and 3 October close the amphitheatre leg, after which the diary thins to one-offs: Granary Live in Salt Lake City on 31 October, two nights at the Masonic Temple in Detroit on 27 and 28 November, and New Year's dates at Temper Festival in San Diego and the Orlando Amphitheater.

What the current show is

The Journey of a Lifetime set runs roughly two hours and is built as a catalogue sweep — MySpace-era uploads and Bassmentality edits at one end, the 2025 and 2026 albums at the other, with hip-hop edits and dubstep material from the middle years in between. Hooks described the shape before the tour started: "it's gonna be all over the place, a lot of new stuff, a lot of things from different eras."

Visually it is a channel-surf to match the records: vintage television broadcasts, old films, surreal animation, archival footage and pop-culture clips, cut and re-cut as the set moves. At Forest Hills on 14 August the screens ran images of Frank Sinatra, John Lennon and Gene Wilder over lasers and pyrotechnics. Reviewers of the Red Rocks opening noted that the lighting and sound were built around the venue's rock walls rather than against them, and that the two nights shared little material — the duo curate each date separately, which is the argument for seeing more than one.