Zedd’s new album ‘Telos’ comes after nine-year wait

It has been almost a decade since Zedd, the Grammy - winning producer and DJ, released his sophomore album, “True Colors.” A lot can happen in that time. Mostly, the German dance-pop maverick needed to push himself to make an album that would move the needle — one that told a story beyond the success of his debut LP, “Clarity,” or “True Colors,” which he says was created to prove that he could not be placed into “this EDM box of making 128 BPM club bangers, because I have more to say.” Enter “Telos,” his long-awaited third full-length. “It is an album that for many years I doubted I could create,” he told The Associated Press. “I wanted something timeless, something that I would be proud of forever, and something that is very detailed and where it’s not just songs thrown together onto a record, but where every song leads into the next.” The project is also highly collaborative, including features from Muse and John Mayer to newer pop voices like Remi Wolf and Bea Miller. In the interview, Zedd discusses “Telos,” being inspired by Jeff Buckley and the state of EDM.

It has been nine years since your last album. Why is that?

I’ve enjoyed not putting pressure on myself, and just releasing singles. And of course, I always — in the back of my mind — I was like, I will make another album. But what am I trying to do, and what am I trying to say? And I came up with these concepts before ever starting (to) work on an album. I wanted it to be meaningful and have some sort of concept behind it, not just, “Hey, I have a contract, I need to make an album.” Then the pandemic came around and I thought, “Well, this is a perfect time. Now everybody’s off. I can finally sit down and make an album.” And I was aimlessly trying to make this album that just didn’t feel genuine to me, and I scrapped the entire thing besides one song, “Dream Brother,” which kind of became a pillar of my album.

“Dream Brother” is a surprise.

The whole inspiration behind “Dream Brother” was this artist, Jeff Buckley, that was so hugely inspiring to me in my life, and that song that was really meaningful to me and that felt like, “Well, this is a concept: making things that are genuinely meaningful to me, that have some sort of connection to my musical education or life.” And I sort of started redoing my album from around “Dream Brother,” And all of a sudden, I felt like, “Oh, there’s a concept there.” And there was this moment when I kind of cracked the code by saying, “This is going to be an album that is purely for me, whatever that means musically.” So that kind of clicked and I realised, “OK, anything that’s coming from the heart is going to be put into this album.”

“Telos” comes from ancient Greek; it can mean “end” or “goal.” What does it mean to you?

“Telos” does have multiple meanings. One of them is accomplishment and reaching your goal, celebrating the human art. And that was what I was feeling for the majority of making the record. I felt like I’ve accomplished something that I didn’t know I could accomplish, creating an album on a level that I wasn’t sure I could still do.

And then towards the tail end of making “Telos,” I started feeling the other emotion, which was just that I exhausted myself so extensively to the point of losing nearly 20 pounds. I couldn’t sleep at night. I would wake up at four in the morning with the song stuck in my head that I was just working on. It was really kind of traumatising in a sense for me, and I kind of really resonated with the meaning — the end — of “Telos.”

Associated Press