genre electronic

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With the holiday season fully swinging, we are officially in the most sentimental time of year, and Zeds Dead knows it.

As such, the mighty duo is sharing Channel Flipping 2: Only You, an epic mashup of classics by artists including Nas, Talking Heads, The Hollies, The Platters and Dionne Warwick, along with clips from films including The Mask and Midnight Cowboy and commentary by comedian Bill Hicks and the sage Tupac Shakur.

The pair spent more than a year making the six-and-a-half-minute clip. Watch it exclusively on Billboard below.

Altogether, the effect of Channel Flipping 2 is heartstring pulling, with the selections and edits whipping up nostalgia, inspiration and a spirit of purpose. The project comes a year after the release of Zeds Dead’s first Channel Flipping mashup, with this new one also extending the motif of the duo’s excellent March album, Return to the Spectrum of Intergalactic Happiness.

Designed to play like a space-time continuum flattening jukebox, the album’s tracks weave in dialogue from The NeverEnding Story and Scarface along with samples from Duke Ellington and Ella Fitzgerald, which are all nestled among the psychedelic bass music.

Below, the duo’s Zachary Rapp-Rovan talks to Billboard about the new mashup, the response to their latest album and why “there’s just something about nostalgia.”

How does Channel Flipping 2: Only You extend the ethos, philosophy and world-building of Return to the Spectrum of Intergalactic Happiness? And why release it now?

It’s all part of the same world so to speak. Over the last few years we’ve been building this concept at our shows of an old television set floating through space that picks up bits and pieces of broadcasts from the last 100 years. It’s also kind of an homage to hip-hop and DJing culture in general. The album and the Channel Flipping series both exist within that world.

As for why release it now? Basically because it’s finally at a place we feel comfortable putting it out. It’s been a while in the making, working on it here and there over a few years. It was started at the same time as the last channel flipping.

It’s been eight months since the release of the album. Do you think fans have really gravitated to and fully understood the concept behind it? What have they told you about it, and what it’s meant to them?

The response has been really amazing from what we can tell! I don’t think it really matters if they think about the concept or not to enjoy it, but most of them probably see it. 

The album and this new video are so nostalgic. What does this nostalgic aspect say about where you’re at as artists and people? Has playing this music on tour hit differently, given the emotional layers?

There’s just something about nostalgia. Its hard to describe, but when you work with samples and cut and manipulate them, sometimes you can end up with some really interesting feelings. Sometimes it’s as if it takes you back to a time you were never a part of but it feels you were, a strange familiarity or something. It’s not something you can make happen every time, but when you hit in it, it’s kind of exciting. It’s not the only thing we love to mess with, but it’s definitely been something we’ve always revered in music I guess you could say.

We had this idea a few years ago to have the person that we sampled playing on the screen at the same time so people could kind of see what’s going on. Most of the time when you’re at a set, you hear a vocal and don’t know where it’s from, but we thought it would be cool to see the original performer if we could find a cool video of it. It adds this extra dimension of emotion sometimes to see that. We’ve just been continuing down that path ever since. 

A darn shame it wasn’t nominated for a dance/electronic Grammy. Were you hoping for a nomination?

We thought it was a longshot, but we submitted anyway, just ’cause why not? We don’t take it as a snub, at the end of the day we’re pretty underground and it would be more of a big surprise if we were nominated. We’re not in this thing for awards — being able to work in music and share it with people is award enough.

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Last fall, Kito and her good friend Blue May spent a lot on the couch at her house in L.A., binge-watching Couples Therapy and discussing the trajectories of their respective careers. Both producers had recently come out of relationships, and they decided they were ready to focus on not only working, but working on something great.

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“We were like, ‘We’ve got to make some s–t happen that we believe in so hard,’” Kito says.

Call it fate or good luck or hard work paying off, but the binge-watching sessions ended a few weeks later, when May got a call from his old friend and previous collaborator Lily Allen. She wanted to make an album, and she was coming to Los Angeles, and more specifically to May’s house in the Hollywood Hills, to do it.

May brought Kito into the project, and with that they were off the couch and in May’s home studio, making some s–t happen that they believed in so hard and that millions of people around the world would eventually believe in too.

An electronic artist and multi-genre producer from Australia who’s lived in Los Angeles since 2018, Kito has a long list of releases on labels including Diplo’s Mad Decent, Astralwerks and Sweat It Out, along with her ongoing Club Kito party at The West Hollywood Edition hotel, events to which surprise guests including Empress Of, A-Trak, Diplo, Mallrat and Tove Lo have shown up. As of October, she also has co-producing credits on eight tracks of Allen’s confessional smash West End Girl.

“I mean, it feels like a new chapter starting,” the artist born Maaike Kito Lebbing says over Zoom from her house, her cat intermittently walking in and out of frame. In addition to working on West End Girl, Kito released a grip of excellent tracks in 2025 and has also executive producer on A Girl Is a Drug, the seven-track EP from DJ/musician/choreographer Parris Goebel that’s out Thursday (Nov. 20). (Goebel is globally known to pop fans for her choreography for superstars like Beyoncé, Rihanna and Justin Bieber, recently becoming a close collaborator of Lady Gaga’s for her Mayhem videos and tour.)

“There were days when I’d be working with everyone on the Lily album, and then I’d be recording with Parris in the evening, and it’s just like, the complete opposite energy — going from just [the Lily project] to club bangers,” Kito explains.

But dipping into, and in fact helping build, the sounds and worlds of other artists has been Kito’s focus for a while. Her career started in Australia when she got into electronic music, then started collecting records and DJing parties. Upon moving to London, she “lived in a five bed share house with a bunch of creatives and got paid cash to DJ” while scoring releases on Skream’s Disfigured Dubz label and generally exploring dubstep, lo-fi and other genres of the day.

She liked this bopping around between sounds and scenes, a sensibility that would inform her later work. “I think that’s why I’m really in my element as a producer for other artists,” Kito says, “because it feels so fun to get into someone’s world and explore it. It’s like being in a different band all the time. I really like that, because I get bored doing the same thing.”

Back in London, things leveled up for her again when began sending out demos, with a beat she sent to Diplo eventually sampled on Trinidad James’ 2013 song “Female$ Welcomed.” This led to her first publishing deal (“I didn’t even know what publishing was,” she says now), with her original James-sampled track eventually used in a Victoria’s Secret campaign.

Compelled by people in her London community who were simultaneously making their own music while also producing for other artists, she moved to L.A. in 2018 to pursue this type of dual path. In SoCal she felt more “invited into rooms that maybe I wouldn’t have been invited into in London, because London is a smaller scene, and people focus on what you’ve done. Coming here people were more like, ‘Oh, you’ve got a different perspective.’”

While experimenting with production techniques, she made loads of music that she just released under her Kito project, which drew the attention of labels in L.A. and resulted in more than two dozens single and EP releases since 2018. But the goal was never to become a jet-setting DJ.

“I’m really proud of the stuff I’ve put out on my artist project, but it’s definitely been me trying stuff as a producer and loosely fitting in the large umbrella of dance music,” Kito says. “I don’t really have a crazy career as a DJ because I don’t know if people know what they’re going to get [from my work.]”

But while her sound vacillated between dancefloors anthems and more indie singer songwriter type fare, she realized she had a superpower in her ability to bridge underground music and pop: “I realized I needed to lean more into what I’m coming to the table with, which is my unique perspective and the more underground music that I’ve been always into. It was always too pop for the underground, and too underground for pop. My palette is a little bit left-of-center, but I love pop music.”

This symbiosis of tastes made Kito the perfect fit to work on left-of-center pop music. She’s got producing credits for artists including Fletcher, Jorja Smith and Empress Of, and also spent 16 days in late 2024 working with May, Allen and a crew of collaborators on West End Girl.

“Blue called me and said, ‘Lily’s coming over to do music and wants to try to do an album. Do you want to do it with us?’” Kito recalls. “I was like, ‘Obviously yes, let’s do it.’”

Kito had actually worked with Allen once before in 2019. Based on that experience and the knowledge Allen wanted to work fast, had the idea to “just rope in all our friends that we know who are great and that everyone’s really comfortable with and see how that feels.”

This social alchemy worked, as a crew including Allen, May, Kito, and a collection of songwriters, producers and instrumentalists — including Chloe Angelides, Chrome Sparks, Alessandro Buccellati, Micah Jasper, Oscar Scheller, Leroy Clampitt, Leon Vynehall, Violet Skies and Hayley Gene Penner — set up shop in the pair of recording spaces May set up in his home.

“It was really special working with Blue, because he’s so good at shutting out the noise of the music industry, and so is Lily,” says Kito. “It was like, ‘This is going to be a little bubble and a world that we’re going to create.”

Gathered with Kito and May, Allen unveiled the themes of the album, which is allegedly about her separation from actor David Harbour amid his infidelities. “She wrote all the song names down in order and told us what she wanted to do the album about,” says Kito. “I mean, she filled us in on everything. We had a big cry and spent a couple hours drinking coffee and just catching up. Then she was like, ‘Okay, let’s do the album.’ I was like, ‘Are you sure?’”

Allen was sure, with the project’s instant rapid pace being “quite unsettling for me,” says Kito, “because I’m used to doing a lot and then picking the best of it. So this was really exciting, but also terrifying. I would be calling Blue like, ‘Hang on a minute. Don’t we need more time?’ But I think he’s such a brilliant quick decision type of person and is so good at trusting his instincts that it gave me confidence to trust mine. I actually don’t think I would have thrown myself into working with Parris this year if I hadn’t come off the back of that process with Lily.” (For his part, upon the album’s release May wrote to Kito on his Instagram that “this record would literally not exist without you! … You brought so many key people into this project – alongside your own insane talent!”)

With two high-profile projects on her 2025 resume, Kito says new opportunities are being presented for her and everyone that worked on West End Girl: “We’ve all been here doing the same work, but this is what happens when one thing connects, it opens doors in a great way. I’m so happy. I’m like, ‘What’s next year gonna be like?’”

While the calendar is quite yet clear, what’s obvious is that there’ll be less binge-watching on the couch and more making s–t happen that Kito believes in, so hard.

This week in dance music: Salt-N-Pepa’s DJ Spinderalla became the first female DJ ever inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame during the induction ceremony in Los Angeles last weekend. Fred again.. took a well-earned week off from his 10 shows/10 songs/10 weeks tour behind his USB002 album and Alison Wonderland welcomed her […]