At the time of our call, the release of Telos — Zedd's first studio album in nearly a decade — is just seven days away. Snug in an earthy brown crewneck, the 34-year-old musician joins the Zoom from his new home in Encino, California, with a degree of poise that some might find surprising at this point in the rollout.
Still, his relaxed body language, decisive, measured speech, and quiet confidence make it clear that any anxiety he once felt about the LP has been replaced by pure anticipation.
"I am honestly just really excited. I think I've released music in the past that I was nervous about, but it's quite different with this album," he tells GRAMMY.com. "I feel very calm and just happy to be able to release this music that I've been working on for so long, some of which has been in the works as late as nine years ago."
Out Aug. 30, Telos arrives about four years later than initially announced and about eight years after it was contractually due. Though Zedd confirmed that the long-awaited answer to his second studio album, True Colors (2015), would arrive in 2020, he indefinitely postponed the project at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.
"I decided to push back the album to when things are more back to normal," he wrote in a Reddit AMA (ask me anything) in November 2020. "I really wanted it to come out this year, but I put the album on standby because during quarantine, I just didn't feel the inspiration to make this the best album possible."
Timing is everything and Zedd, who counts a clock ticking sample among his stylistic hallmarks, knows this well. Zedd embraced the axiom while making Telos, an album that "isn't for the algorithms" in an era when creative works' cultural capital is largely decided by how well they pander to an algorithm. Telos is decidedly — and in some ways, daringly — non-commercial. "Lucky," alongside singer/songwriter Remi Wolf and "Automatic Yes" with John Mayer, are notably the only two tracks palatable for commercial radio airplay. The 10-track album largely plays like a love letter to classical music (there is an orchestra on the entire LP), with flashes of pop, dance/electronic, jazz, world music, and metal influence. A cross-generational list of collaborators — including 40-year-old musician and composer Jeremy Kittle, who recorded each string for the album one by one, and Gen Z singer-songwriter Bea Miller — further dynamize Telos.
Telos "isn't going to be that pop album that some people may have wanted me to make," Zedd acknowledges. Nor will it be the dance/electronic LP that purists from his name-making run in the early-2010’s might long for. Fans gained during the GRAMMY-winning producer's complextro, electro, and progressive house-heavy era (think "Shave It") have been some of his most outspoken critics in recent years, reproaching his stride into commercial pop.
This response is neither surprising nor foreign to Zedd. "I felt the same way about a lot of bands and artists that I grew up listening to when I heard their new music," he reflects. "In the moment, you might be like, I'm disappointed, 'cause I wanted X, Y, Z, and with a little bit of perspective, you realize what an artist has done, and maybe those become your favorite works when you give it time."
Zedd has already proved his ability to craft pop hits with staying power — with help from some of the genre’s most prominent voices. The 2017 single "Stay" with Alessia Cara (2017) and 2018's "The Middle" with Maren Morris and Grey were two of Zedd's biggest smashes in the dance-pop domain post-True Colors. Both singles achieved platinum certification, though "The Middle" has since struck platinum six times. Like "Clarity" — the 2012 breakthrough single that scored Zedd his sole golden gramophone (for Best Dance Recording) — "Stay" and "The Middle" imbued him with the confidence and greater depth of reference to make an album like Telos.
"If I made another album today that felt the same way Clarity felt back then, you wouldn't feel the same way about Clarity today," Zedd reasons, adding that Telos has some of the "internal motivations" and experimentation of Clarity. "It's just a more mature and experienced expression, so I think the people who loved Clarity will find plenty to love on Telos."
The album's debut single, "Out Of Time" featuring Bea Miller, is likely to serve as one such point of connection. It retains the DNA of Zedd's established, melody-driven sonic identity while still feeling fresh and exploratory.
"It's a really good example of a new version of an old me," he attests. "The real core of what Zedd feels like isn't the sound. It's not the synths, and it's not the kicks you hear at the festival. It's actually really deeply rooted in chord progressions and melodies. Those are well alive, and more than ever, on Telos."
At nine-and-a-half-years-old, "Out Of Time" is the oldest track on the album, penned just after Zedd delivered True Colors (OG fans will recognize the song's chord progression from the intro to his DJ sets). His motivation to repeatedly rework the track and fashion it into the album opener stems, in part, from the feeling that it was "too theatrical" to be a standalone single.
Telos provided "the perfect canvas to deliver all these meaningful songs to my life and to my career that couldn't just be one-offs," he says.
Zedd’s current musical ethos is born from his disenchantment with the direction of music in the age of algorithms and TikTok, and the resulting Telos is the product of his "decision to really be free musically."
"There was one moment in making Telos that made me realize this is like my autobiography. This is everything I am as an artist, and everything I do musically is for me," Zedd says with conviction. "That was a really liberating moment because I am essentially guaranteeing that I'm not going to disappoint anyone because the only audience is me. I'm making this for myself."
"It sounds so silly to even say [this album is just going to be for me] because you would think that everything you make as an artist is for you," he concedes. "But really, the truth is it's hard to block out the feeling that people might be disappointed, and the feeling that you could change a song, and you would make so many people happy."
Telos' exhaustive creation process was as much a matter of deconstruction as it was reconstruction. About halfway through the first version of "Z3," as the album is known colloquially among fans, Zedd scrapped 90 percent of what he'd written, salvaging only "Dream Brother." The hypnotic interpretation of Jeff Buckley's 1994 song embodies the musicality that threads Telos — from the texture of the opening guitar chords and piano, to the swell of strings, and Zedd's signature clock ticking sample in its outro. Telos marks the first and only time the Buckley estate has given an artist the rights to the late creative's work.
"Dream Brother," Zedd explains, was "the only song that felt like this is living very much in the world that I really deeply feel," citing it as "a song that has inspired me since my early days as a musician."
Between his successes on Billboard's Hot Dance/Electronic Songs chart and the coveted Hot 100, it may be easy to forget that Zedd's musicality traces back to childhood. A classically trained musician, Zedd began playing the piano at the age of four and still writes his music on the piano first. Telos is a cerebral reminder that it's reductive to think of Zedd as anything less than a natural-born composer.
Elsewhere, "Sona," featuring the olllam, harkens back to Zedd's days as a member of German metalcore band DIORAMIC in its use of the 7/4 time signature. "Sona" is the first song in this time signature that Zedd has made since his days as a band member (he was the group's drummer from ages 12 to 20).
Still, Telos' unequivocal pièce de resistance is "1685" with GRAMMY-winning English rock band Muse. The six-minute and 11-second album finale takes inspiration from Johann Sebastian Bach's "The Well Tempered Clavier" — the first classical piece Zedd ever learned to play on piano as a child and as he calls it, "probably the most influential piece ever written in life for me."
Named for Bach's birth year, "1685" extends the full-circle nature of Telos. Both a tribute to his favorite composer and a reference to Zedd's earliest days as a musician (he performed a cover of Muse during his very first concert with DIORAMIC), these connections imbue Telos with authenticity and soul.
Intricate and lovingly-crafted, Telos is Zedd at his most musically honest. "It's my entire life in one album," he says. "It's truly an evolution of who I am as a musician."
His decision to eschew trends and commercial formulae to embrace "music for the sake of art" confers a sense of timelessness to Telos. For those versed in gaming terminology (like the multi-platinum producer, a notorious gamer) Telos is Zedd in his final form — a state unlocked only after the successful completion of considerable, skill-building challenges.
Fittingly, the multifaceted nature of Telos and its creator is reflected in the album's title. The Greek word has multiple meanings, including accomplishment, completion of human art, and the end. He chose the name "telos" 30 or so minutes before he had to submit the LP — an ironic timeline for a production that took years to conceive. Yet like all of the creative choices that culminate in Telos, this, too, was part of a thoughtful strategy. Zedd wanted to be sure that the album's title would faithfully capture its concept, even after the LP’s many metamorphoses.
"I really relate to all of the meanings," he says. "Accomplishment of a goal is one of them. I made this album that I was dreaming of making my whole life with the artists I love so much who have inspired me, so it's a genuine dream come true to make this album."
With introspection written on his face, Zedd pauses, then continues: "One of the meanings of 'telos' is the end, and there was a good chunk of time where I thought this might be the last music I will ever release. It's kind of like I put all my emotions and feelings into this one album…is there any reason for me to take space away in this universe if this is all I have left to say? And for a moment towards the tail end, I was like 'yeah, Telos is the name for this album because I will never make another song in my life.'"\
But Telos is merely another beginning, briefly disguised as an end. Zedd delivered the album, had a second to breathe, moved from Beverly Hills to Encino, put a piano in his bedroom, and "inevitably started writing new music." Timing is everything.