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The holidays are officially here, so it might be time to think about the best gifts to show your love for your friends and family — especially if they are Lego fans. But, why give the same old Lego gifts, when you can give the gift of music-themed sets unique to the music-lover in your life?

We rounded up Lego sets for the holidays from Walmart. Not only do these Lego sets display warm feelings of love, music and pop culture — like Lego Fender Stratocaster and Lego The Boombox — but they also give you the most valuable of holiday gifts: Spending time with your friends and family assembling the sets together.

And since it’s from Walmart, you’ll get it shipped to you for free if you’re a Walmart+ member. Otherwise, your cart has to be more than $35 to get free shipping.

Not a member? You can sign up for a 30-day free trial to take advantage of everything the retailer’s rewards program has to offer, including free delivery; fuel savings at Exxon, Mobil, Walmart or Murphy gas stations; streaming access to Paramount+ to watch hit originals such as Halo, Fatal Attraction, Star Trek: Lower Decks; early deals access and much more. Learn more about Walmart+ here.

Meanwhile, there are Lego sets for holiday gift-giving available at Lego.com, Amazon and Target too. Keep reading to shop our music-themed Lego sets for the holiday season below.

This one’s for our jazz lovers. This interactive scene of a Lego jazz quartet is so much fun and retails for just $169.99. The set comes with four musicians set on a stage playing their instruments joyfully striking dynamic poses mid-music session. Sitting on a shelf or in a music room, this set makes an amazing decor piece.

Create a fun scene of friends belting tunes with this Lego Friends Karaoke Music Party Set, retailing for $21.50. The set includes a revolving stage, Lego Friends characters Nova and Liann with additional faces for extra fun and a pet gecko figure. You’ll also get microphones, drinks, cupcakes, a present, chocolate, flowers, tickets and balloons to create a more imaginative scene.

Spin some tunes with friends and family this holiday season by building this Lego Creator 3 in 1 Record Player with Flowers for just $42.48. This creative music-lovers set is three in one because you’ll be able to construct and reconstruct three distinct retro-style models using the same bricks. The record player is interactive because it is fixed with a moving turntable and tonearm with a stylus and two records that you can change out whenever you please. Plus, the added flowers add a decorative touch.

Who doesn’t love building Lego sets? The practice is therapeutic and fun, allowing users to tap into their childlike side. This set retails for $29.99 and is shaped like a tropical ukulele. Once built, the set makes a great decor piece.

Rock out with this Lego Fender Stratocaster for $208, a model inspired by the real-life electric guitar. The set is extremely detailed, emulating the 1970s Fender Stratocaster guitar with a possible whammy bar, pickup switch, tuning pegs and six strings. With the set, you’ll also receive a buildable Fender 65 Princeton Reverb amplifier featuring removable panels so you can see inside the amp into the motherboard, reverb tank and speaker.

Throw it back to the 70s and 80s with this Lego VIDIYO Boombox set retailing for $99.99. This set doubles as a playset, making it super interactive. The set includes four minifigures with musical accessories, 14 random BeatBits and four special BeatBits, making this boombox tons of fun for kids and adults alike.

Another lovely set we’d put up in a music room or on a shelf is this Lego Grand Piano set, retailing for $399.95. The set depicts an extremely detailed “playable” Grand Piano model with 14 songs accessible to play via the Lego Powered Up app. Once built, turn on the motor (batteries are not included) and then you can play music with modes like user play to play yourself, or activate the autoplay mode and just listen.

Go to the moon with this Pharrell Williams x Lego Over the Moon Set, retailing for $129.99. The set features exclusive Pharrell and Helen Williams minifigures with 49 unique interchangeable character heads and a space shuttle with an open cockpit to seat your minifigures, along with attachable landing gear, and 2 space helmets with gold-colored visors that open.

If you’re a gamer who loves nostalgia, then you’ll love this Nintendo Entertainment System Set, retailing for $499.95. The set comes with a vintage-inspired TV displaying the Super Mario Bros on the screen, along with a vintage NES console recreated in Lego style with a controller and an opening slot for the buildable Game Pak. It’s everything the nerd in your life will love all in one place.

Take the stage and play around with this Lego Friends Heartlake City Music Talent Show, retailing for $68.68. The detailed set is massive and extremely colorful, giving kids and adults alike hours of entertainment. The set comes with four Lego Friends characters, a stage and lots of accessories to keep the party going.

Ride along as a groupie on this buildable Lego Friends Pop Star Music Tour Bus available for $67.99. The tour bus toy playset facilitates musical role play with four mini-doll characters and numerous accessories. The tour bus features a recording area, keyboard, guitar, beds and a bathroom.

Last-minute shopping can be frustrating for the holidays, but it helps to have a plan in place. When shopping online, you’ll want to factor in shipping deadlines so that your gift gets delivered in time. The holidays falls on Thursday, Dec. 25, so it’s best to get your gifts shipped as soon as possible, or at least by Dec. 18-19, which is the delivery deadline for most online retailers — like Walmart.

Want more? Shop more Lego sets for the holidays at Walmart, Target, Amazon and Lego.com.

For more product recommendations, check out our roundups of the best Xbox deals, studio headphones and Nintendo Switch accessories.

For the most part, the stars who defined pop music in October continued to do so in November: namely, Taylor Swift and Olivia Dean, the artists with the biggest hits and the most momentum in top 40 right now, respectively. But outside of their dominance, it was still a big month for rising and returning pop artists coming through with surprising new releases, impressive chart breakthroughs, major award show moments and other head-turning achievements — getting it all in before the final bell rings for 2025 at the end of this month.

This week, we look back at the November that was in pop stardom, as host Andrew Unterberger is joined by Billboard staffers Trevor Anderson and Michael Saponara to share and debate our respective November top five lists, while also naming some honorable mentions, some disappointments, and some artists who we’re looking forward to in the final months of the year. (If you missed our recaps of the first 10 months of 2025, check them out here, including our review of the entire first half of the year in pop stardom.)

While doing so, we answer all the big questions about November pop stardom: Do Olivia Dean’s performances match the excitement around her in general? Did Taylor Swift make the right move flooding the zone in Showgirl‘s first week and disappearing almost immediately after? Is Rosalía setting the standard for pop star excellence right now? Why do some people still not believe in Tate McRae as a top-tier superstar? Is Ella Langley headed for 2026 superstardom? Was Summer Walker’s Finally Over It actually a disappointment, or is our disappointment in how it was received? And what’s still left to impact the Greatest Pop Stars of 2025 race — which we’ll present our final picks for in January?

Check it out above, along with a YouTube playlist of some of the greatest moments in November 2025 pop stardom — all of which are discussed on the pod — and subscribe to the Greatest Pop Stars podcast on Apple Music or Spotify (or wherever you get your podcasts) for weekly discussions every Thursday about all things related to pop stardom!

And as we say in every one of these GPS podcast posts — if you have the time and money to spare, please consider donating to any of these causes in the fight for trans rights:

Transgender Law Center

Trans Lifeline

Destination Tomorrow

Gender-Affirming Care Fundraising on GoFundMe

Also, please consider giving your local congresspeople a call in support of trans rights, with contact information you can find on 5Calls.org.

Billboard Japan has unveiled its 2025 year-end charts, tracking the period from Nov. 25, 2024, to Nov. 23, 2025.

The No. 1 Song of the Year on the Japan Hot 100 is Mrs. GREEN APPLE’s “Lilac.” Released April 12, 2024, the track serves as the opening theme for the anime Oblivion Battery. It placed at No. 5 on the 2024 year-end list, but renewed attention from the end of that year into this one propelled the song back to the top of the Japan Hot 100, logging five weeks at the summit during the 2025 chart year.

The three-man band dominates the top 2 year-end slots, with “Darling” finishing at No. 2. The song was written as the theme for NHK’s television special featuring the group collaborating with teenagers called Mrs. GREEN APPLE 18 Fes that aired on NHK Dec. 25, 2024.

No. 3 goes to ROSÉ & Bruno Mars’ “APT.” Amid these long-running hits, Kenshi Yonezu’s “IRIS OUT,” released in September 2025, breaks through at No. 4. Mrs. GREEN APPLE rounds out the top 5 with “KUSUSHIKI.” The hitmakers place three songs in the year-end top 5 and five in the top 10.

Commenting on Mrs. GREEN APPLE’s year-end accomplishments, frontman Motoki Omori shared, “I’m happy. Simply happy, and I really feel the weight of it. I’m going to keep working hard so we live up to what this represents. At the same time, I don’t want to carry it so heavily that it becomes a burden. I want to keep enjoying the process of making music.” Guitarist Hiloto Wakai adds, ‘Lilac’ came out in 2024, so having it recognized like this in 2025 makes us truly grateful that it’s been loved for this long. We love the song ourselves, so it’s a real joy.” Keyboardist Ryoka Fujisawa noted, “Part of why we push so hard with Mrs. GREEN APPLE is to get Omori’s lyrics and music out into the world, so it makes me really happy to see ‘Lilac’ being enjoyed for so long and that it’s reaching people. It means a lot to us that people are enjoying the various songs we’ve been releasing as a band.”

For the second year in a row, the Album of the Year on Billboard Japan’s Hot Albums chart goes to Snow Man, with their best-of collection THE BEST 2020 – 2025. The hugely popular J-pop boy band becomes the first act ever to take the title three times, the other two works being Snow Labo. S2 in 2022 and RAYS in 2024.

“We’re grateful to have received this award thanks to the many people who support us every day,” says Snow Man leader Hikaru Iwamoto. “We hope THE BEST 2020 – 2025, which we released to mark the fifth anniversary of Snow Man’s debut, will continue to serve as a way for people to discover us in the years to come.”

Mrs. GREEN APPLE sweeps the slots from No. 2 to No. 4, with ANTENNA, Attitude and 10, respectively. At No. 5 is Vaundy’s first album strobo. Since streaming was added to the Hot Albums chart methodology late last year, long-running hits have become more prominent on the tally.

And the Artist of the Year on the Artist 100 ranking compiled from the results of the Japan Hot 100 and Hot Albums charts is Mrs. GREEN APPLE. The band becomes the first act to top this list for two consecutive years. Veteran band back number follows at No. 2 on the strength of “Blue Amber,” and hitmaker Kenshi Yonezu places at No. 3 with “Plazma,” which rules the year’s Top Download Songs list. HANA, the breakout girl group that made its major-label debut in April, comes in at No. 5, while the group’s producer, rapper-singer CHANMINA, appears at No. 10.

With Japanese artists expanding their touring overseas and the launch of the international music awards show MUSIC AWARDS JAPAN, momentum toward a more global music market continues to accelerate in the country’s music industry. On the year-end Global Japan Songs Excl. Japan chart — which ranks songs from Japan that are being listened to internationally — tracking the period from Nov. 22, 2024, to Nov. 20, 2025, Creepy Nuts’ “Otonoke” finishes at No. 1. The song also claims the top spot in five countries and regions on the Japan Songs charts that list songs by each country and region.

“Traveling with our own headlining shows really made us feel just how many fans we have in each country,” says Creepy Nuts rapper R-Shitei. “We toured Asia this time around, but it made me think how great it’d be to do the same in countries we haven’t toured yet.” DJ Matsunaga adds, “Bringing Japanese as-is to listeners overseas — preserving the quality of the language — really depends on the sound acting as a hub, so we’ve got to keep taking in new ideas and refining what we do. What defines us most is the language. That’s the biggest thing for us.”

Billboard JAPAN Hot 100 of the Year 2025

1. “Lilac” / Mrs. GREEN APPLE

2. “Darling” / Mrs. GREEN APPLE

3. “APT.” / Rosé & Bruno Mars

4. “IRIS OUT” / Kenshi Yonezu

5. “KUSUSHIKI” / Mrs. GREEN APPLE

6. “ROSE” / HANA

7. “Kaiju” / sakanaction

8. “Que Sera Sera” / Mrs. GREEN APPLE

9. “Bitter Vacances” / Mrs. GREEN APPLE

10. “Plazma” / Kenshi Yonezu

Billboard JAPAN Hot Albums of the Year 2025

1. THE BEST 2020 – 2025 / Snow Man

2. ANTENNA / Mrs. GREEN APPLE

3. Attitude / Mrs. GREEN APPLE

4. 10 / Mrs. GREEN APPLE

5. strobo / Vaundy

6. replica / Vaundy

7. No.Ⅰ / Number_i

8. Hello! We’re timelesz / timelesz

9. BAD HOP / BAD HOP

10. LOST CORNER / Kenshi Yonezu

Billboard JAPAN Artist 100 of the Year 2025

1. Mrs. GREEN APPLE

2. back number

3. Kenshi Yonezu

4. Vaundy

5. HANA

6. Snow Man

7. Official HIGE DANdism

8. Fujii Kaze

9. YOASOBI

10. CHANMINA

Billboard JAPAN Global Japan Songs Excl. Japan of the Year 2025

1. “Otonoke” / Creepy Nuts

2. “Bling-Bang-Bang-Born” / Creepy Nuts

3. “TOKYO DRIFT(FAST & FURIOUS)” / TERIYAKI BOYZ

4. “IRIS OUT” / Kenshi Yonezu

5. “Shinunoga E-Wa” / Fujii Kaze

6. “Mayonaka no Door / Stay With Me” / Miki Matsubara

7. “Idol” / YOASOBI

8. “KICK BACK” / Kenshi Yonezu

9. “NIGHT DANCER” / imase

10. “Yoru Ni Kakeru” / YOASOBI

The Trump administration has drawn fire recently for its unauthorized use of music by A-listers including Sabrina Carpenter, Taylor Swift, Olivia Rodrigo and Kenny Loggins and others in videos promoting its agenda. And while the use of recognizable hits by chart-toppers appears to be a feature, not a bug, of the White House’s attempt to keep attention focused on the president’s top priorities, on Wednesday (Dec. 3) the U.S. Dept. of Homeland Security (DHS) posted a video promoting Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) recruitment set to the tune of a song most music lovers are probably unfamiliar with.

The results, however, were the same: anger from the artist who said he was furious about what he deemed the wholly unauthorized, inappropriate use of his music in a government propaganda video.

“I’m disgusted to see our music was used without our knowledge or consent to promote I.C.E.,” wrote indie producer/rapper Joey Valence of the Philadelphia hip-hop duo Joey Valence and Brae on X. “To be clear this video does NOT represent my OR JVB’s thoughts or beliefs in any form and we are actively working to have it taken down.”

The DHS promo video in question that dropped on Wednesday evening is cued to the group’s 2023 single “Hooligang,” and it opens with the track’s spoken word intro, “Yo, you wanna see something cool?… Well, I’m a do it anyway,” over video of the sign outside the Buffalo, N.Y. ICE detention facility. It then cuts to a series of shots of snow-covered ICE military vehicles and groups of masked, long-gun-toting ICE agents in full combat gear aiming their rifles and tooling around in aimless circles on the running boards of the trucks in the recruitment clip that ends with the message “Join ICE.GOV.”

The video’s caption reads: “This winter, the forecast calls for ICE.” The clip is the latest example of the Trump White House using popular music to advance its domestic agenda in meme-seeking clips that mix lighthearted captions with visuals intended to feel ominous or edgy.

At press time a spokesperson for ICE/DHS had not returned Billboard‘s request for comment.

Earlier this week, Carpenter lambasted the White House for posting a compilation of ICE officers chasing, tackling and handcuffing people on the streets set to her Short n’ Sweet song “Juno.”

“This video is evil and disgusting,” Carpenter wrote on X. “Do not ever involve me or my music to benefit your inhumane agenda.” In keeping with its edgelord-style responses to pushback from the peeved artists, Trump spokesperson Abigail Jackson told Newsweek, “Here’s a Short n’ Sweet message for Sabrina Carpenter: We won’t apologize for deporting dangerous criminal illegal murderers, rapists, and pedophiles from our country. Anyone who would defend these sick monsters must be stupid, or is it slow?”

Carpenter joins a long list of musicians who have expressed their anger and disgust with the administration for hijacking their songs without authorization to promote its agenda. Last month, Rodrigo condemned the White House for pairing a video encouraging self-deportations with her song “All-American Bitch.”

“don’t ever use my songs to promote your racist, hateful propaganda,” she wrote. In addition, Loggins lashed out at POTUS for using his Top Gun hit “Danger Zone” in an AI-generated video in which Trump appeared to spray fecal matter on “No Kings” protestors. And Swifties called out the White House for a TikTok that used the lyrics to Swift’s Billboard Hot 100 chart-topper “The Fate of Ophelia” in a bizarre promotional video mixing footage of military hardware with images of twice-impeached Trump’s mugshot and pictures of his cabinet.

It’s a rainy afternoon in Los Angeles, and listening to the new TEED album during a crosstown drive shapes the grey into a moody ambience, like melancholy laced with longing and a beat, with the cumulative effect making even the stop/start traffic feel vibey.

“To me, it’s romantic,” TEED himself says upon sitting down at a Hollywood lunch spot, where he orders a turkey club and black tea. Dressed for the weather in jeans and a brown leather jacket, he looks like a colder-climate version of the character he’s been channeling in the promo materials for his third album, Always With Me — out Friday (Dec. 5) via The Orchard and his own label, Nice Age.

In these music videos and IG posts, he plays a sort of serious man on vacation, with imagery finding him in beachy locations gazing seriously towards the sea. The aesthetic is a sort of adult take on the summer vacations the Los Angeles-based, U.K.-born artist, whose real name is Orlando Higginbottom, took as a child, when his big family piled in the car and drove to France, where his mother is from.

“We’d take two days to get there, and I’d have my headphones on for two days, and it would be like my own little hero’s journey, this sort of transformation,” he says. “I’d be in the mountains for a month, and my imagination would go off… Lots of dreaming happened on holiday.” Years later and thousands of miles away, he’s tried weaving the afterglow of these memories into the album’s 11 tracks and, through them, passing the feeling forward: “I hope that it’s dreamy for people,” he says, “and that it makes them daydream.”

The music is transportive, and in a more practical sense it’s also helped deliver Higginbottom’s project to its latest incarnation, with the artist long known as Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs now just going by TEED. The way he tells it the decision was both natural — a lot of people have always just called him TEED anyways — and a function of a more adult hero’s journey that’s brought him through the mad success of his 2012 debut, Trouble, through the strange wilderness of the music industry and his subsequent rejection of it, with a decade passing between Trouble and its 2022 followup, When The Lights Go. Amid it all there were “some real low points,” sobriety achieved during the pandemic, and now, a new body of work.

Always With Me comes at moment when the music industry is distinctly different from the era in which TEED started releasing music. “I think strategy has become as much of a conversation, if not more of a conversation, than the actual art,” he says. “Everyone is a marketing expert. We’re watching the marketing as art now, which is really funny. It’s really strange. I don’t like it. We’re clapping for people’s strategy. Can we just listen to the song and applaud that?”

But now older and wiser — and settled into nice working relationships with The Orchard, through which he releases music, and his team at Jet Management (a place he calls “calm”) — one gets the sense that TEED is watching it all now with a sort of distanced amusement that’s created the space for him to make the stylish and thoughtful songs that make up his new album. While he confesses he’s “failed completely” at making a club record, he’s making it work on the road, with his current headlining tour taking him across the U.S. until Dec. 20 and picking up in Australia around the new year.

Below, he talks about it all.

Your new album is really gorgeous. What is it about?

It’s a less self-involved record than the last one. There’s a bit of course-correction, in a way. I often wonder if we all just make records to apologize for the last one we put out. I feel like that’s partly what’s going on here. I wanted to make something lighter, warmer, less heavy, a more enjoyable listen. I realized that actually, what I asked from people listening to the last one was like, “Do you want to come down to my murky, sad little cabin with me and listen to my sadness?”

Is that what you’re apologizing for?

Kind of. I wanted to do something that was a nicer listen, basically, so you start from that point of view. It was less self-involved in my present — I was thinking about long-gone past things… You explore ideas, but it’s how those ideas make you feel. So I was thinking about a thing, then about how that thing makes me feel. Then I made the music. So it’s not like I put the actual idea I was thinking about directly into the music, it’s the secondary feeling.

Break that down a bit for me.

One of the things I’ve been slightly obsessing about is the tone of an emotion. My version of the blues is different from your version of the blues. We both had a first experience with the romantic blues at some point in our lives, and a pin got set in the ground and in our emotional map. For me, the color of that first experience has resonated all the way through my life. And it’s so bizarre, because your first experience of the blues might be so different, or it might be the same. I just don’t know.

But a lot of these big first romantic feelings and awakenings, I realized, happened during summer holidays. So this is the through line. Once I started thinking about it, I was like, “This is the world I’m going to build, and I’m going think about this, and I’m going angle things that are a bit over here a bit more towards this.” So some theme appears slowly, and then I go, “That’s what I’m gonna do.” So there’s, like, 60% of a record that looks a bit like that, and then I push everything else in that direction.

I was wondering where this kind of “sad guy on vacation” aesthetic that’s present in the rollout materials came from.

[Laughs.] If I could present as happy, believe me, I would, but it is almost impossible for me. I mean, like, I’m smiling at the moment — because this is a nice natural thing for me to do — but if you put a camera in front of me, I can’t do it.

Why?

I don’t know. Because I’m British? I just present as disappointed. I think I have resting disappointment face.

There were 10 years between your first two albums, then three years between this one and the last one. Tell me about that timeline, and if there was anything to that longer gap and then this shorter one.

Well, the longer gap is difficult for me to talk about, because it was just s–tty. I guess I lost my way, got pretty depressed for a bit, couldn’t figure out the music industry, was very confused by my first experience with my first album and the success of that. I didn’t have the means to understand that it was successful and how far it had gone. I didn’t have any perspective on it.

Why?

I was either unable to hear what people were saying to me, or no one said the right things to me. I was just like, “F–k this. I want to disappear for a bit.” I’d had a weird time releasing with Universal, like everyone does. Then I sort of spiraled for a long time. I was having a reasonable time, but it was also very hard, and there were some real low points. I found my way out, basically, thanks to the pandemic and thanks to a stubbornness and sort of “f–k it” attitude, which I managed to pick back up again. I’d always had that when I was growing up, then suddenly it was knocked out of me somehow.

What did the “f–k it” attitude turn into caring too much?

You just lose it. You lose the sparkiness. You lose the silliness. You have to be goofy to survive this thing. There has to be a little bit of “Well, who cares?” But it all became too serious, and too big and too heavy. I went round and met all the managers at one point when I didn’t have management. I knew enough about the music industry to know that everyone was lying to me at a certain point in the conversation. Nice people, but they all bulls–tted me. So I was like, “Well, I’m not gonna work with any of you guys. This is depressing.” There’s a sort of learning curve in the game.

So what did you do?

It definitely helped that I sobered up in 2020 or 2021. I got that album out, self-released it, worked with The Orchard, which actually changed my whole thing, because I was the record label. They were super supportive. They gave me the marketing money I needed to do everything. So actually, I found a version of the music industry that made me feel safe, and it was [The Orchard]. I love them; I’m working with them again on this record. They love me, it’s great. They haven’t made any money out of me, but they’re supportive, and they know they will one day, or they think they will one day.

Can you give me an example of a lie someone told you, in all those conversations with potential management?

Who their clients are, who they manage. They lie about what kind of deals they’ve gotten for people. They’ll lie about the people they know. They’ll say, “Oh, I’m best friends with this person.” It’s like, “I know that person very well.” I’d call them afterwards like “Do know this manager?” “No, met him once four years ago.” Where I’m at now, I see it very clearly, and I can kind of find my way through it. But at the time, because I was in a very vulnerable place, I was like, “No, I can’t be around this thing.”

So you kind of rejected the whole thing.

I kind of rejected the whole thing. I could go on about that whole thing for a long time. It was lost years, in a way. There were definitely albums I made that never came out. I was always making music. It wasn’t a creative block. It was like the final action of putting music out was the hard thing.

Was there a turning point?

I had a birthday in 2018, and a friend texted me that day and said, “Do something for yourself today.” I was like, “I’m going to put some music out.” I’d been into every room I wanted to go into with these two unreleased songs I had. Everyone wanted to hear them, and I just put one of them up on SoundCloud that day. The artwork was me eating a banana in the mirror.

That was a huge release for me, personally — because I’d been holding on, and I put it out, and people loved it. I went out that day and partied with my friends, and I got home and realized that I’d released music again, after not putting anything out for five years. I just burst into tears for hours. It was great. It was just like, “Oh, here we are. That’s what I that’s what I’m supposed to do. I’m supposed to put stuff out, whether I’m sure of it or not.”

So the actual like time spent making the music for this new album, set that scene for me. Was there a typical sort of day?

My ideal day is that I get up, immediately go and listen to what I did the day before, have a coffee, then go do some exercise and spend the rest of the day making music. I love that, and it doesn’t go unappreciated. I’m so grateful that that’s what I get to do a lot of the time. Because of the relative success of the project, I can afford to do that and take time. That’s a big factor in this industry now: How do you afford to take the time to develop a piece of work? Because everyone is pushing you to put something out. The game is content, content, content, so things are really rushed.

So this was a year or so of making music while I was touring and running around and producing other people’s records, then maybe six months of being very focused on this album. Obviously I’m still traveling and playing at the same time. So maybe three days a week I can do that… And now I’m working on the next one, apologizing for this one. [Laughs.]

What do you think you have to say “sorry” for now?

I don’t know if I should say, but I think it could be cooler. My big revelation about my creative process over the last two weeks is that I have an inner contrarian against my own taste… There is a part of me that goes [gestures towards water glass] “That glass is absolutely perfect. It’s beautiful. That’s exactly how we like a glass.” Then this other part of me goes, “Yeah, but you can’t just do what you like like. Let’s f–k it up a bit. Let’s ruin it 15%”

I think that’s probably what I’m going to be thinking about — can I actually make a record that’s entirely to my taste, without letting contrarian saboteur come in and spoil the elements?

So you’ve been able to identify this voice as a saboteur, versus someone who’s like, nudging you in a particular creative direction?

It’s a saboteur. It’s bad.

That’s great to know, because we all have so many voices in our heads that it can be hard to ascertain what’s true.

I’ve had a Greek chorus of critics for a long time. You know, my enemies. They’re up there, and they’re like, “Haha, this is s–t. You’re an idiot.” I think everyone has that. This one is much closer to me. This is very personal. When I was a kid, my friends would say I was a contrarian, and I think this is where that’s ended up.

I can see how it could be confusing, because the idea it’s giving you isn’t necessarily bad.

Yeah, it’s like, “If it sounds a bit s–t, maybe that’s how it should sound”. And it’s like, “Well, actually, I have a big intellectual, technical part of me that knows I can make that sound better, even closer to perfect.” I’m always trying to get somewhere near that thing. I know how to do that, and I know what it is. Then the saboteur, the contrarian, goes, “Nah, f–k it. F–k it. F–k it!!”

Kind of like a nihilist.

Totally. It’s a defense thing. Like, “Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs.” That was a defense.

Right, so you’ve officially changed your name to TEED. I read in an interview from awhile ago that you chose that first name in an attempt to be outside trends. But it sounds like maybe you have a different perspective now?

No, no, no. That was it, but like, what is that? What is an attempt to be outside of trends? Really, it’s an attempt to not be pinned down, to have an ironic shield against the world. I’m actually pretty grateful for it. I think maybe I wouldn’t be here without it. If I’d been an entirely self-serious artist without humor and without a little silliness, I never would have put anything out. It helps to have a thing where you’re a bit like, “Here’s this thing I really love, but I don’t really mean it.”

So if someone else hates it, it doesn’t hurt you.

Yeah, less so. It’s less harmful. But also, on the trends and the what’s cool/what’s not cool thing, it was nice not to really be part of that, because that’s such a silly, fickle world, and it’s run by about 100 people. I don’t want to give them the keys to my career. And actually, that worked really well. A lot of people just completely ignored me. They didn’t say good things or bad things about me, and that was nice, but I found my audience anyway.

So along with the maturity, I think, comes the feeling that times have changed. Having an ironic outward brand no longer works, because people don’t spend more than half a second assessing your outer brand, as it were… I think within the music and within me, there’s still humor and subversion, but on the surface of it, it’s just TEED, so think whatever you like. It doesn’t mean anything.

Also Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs is a mouthful. Did you ever run into difficulty of it just being like, a lot to get out?

Radio DJs hated it. But actually most of all, I feel bad for fans, because, phonetically it’s horrible to say. As it comes out of your mouth, it is a nasty experience. People who are like, out there telling their friends about my music and that they love it, and I’m putting them through this thing of them wanting to feel cool, telling their friends about cool music, but then I make them say this insanely uncool thing, which… I feel bad about that. So, sorry about that.

Apologizing still!

Always.

You worked on the last SG Lewis album and his Heat EP with Tove Lo, which makes sense as there’s a lot of connective tissue between those projects and your new album. What sonic world do you think you guys are inhabiting?

A lot of people I work with, myself included, I think we’re all trying to do a very similar thing, which is try and merge the body, the physicality of electronic music, with songwriting and the emotional depth of songwriting. Obviously some people have managed to do it very well over the last 40 years. Depeche Mode, or Michael Jackson, or lots of the ’80s U.K. synth wave people. Then you have classic house records from the ’90s and 2000s that really sit in that place where there’s a great song with great lyrics and you can ignite a dance floor. I think there’s certainly an itch there that loads of us are trying to scratch and figure it out. I still haven’t managed to do it.

Do you think you’re getting close?

I don’t know. I enjoy the journey, because then I end up with completely different things and it’s fine… It’s a kind of timeless problem to be staring at.