Culture 10/23/2026

EDM producer tags and the Skrillex mixtape

Spoken producer tags are a rap habit, and in 2025 EDM’s biggest name borrowed it by handing his album to DJ Smokey, a mixtape-style host. Here is how that happened, plus the tags of RedOne, Marshmello, ISOxo and Yellow Claw, and what we found for Diplo.

By VTG Staff

6 minute read

Listen to this article

On March 31, 2025, the night before April Fools’ Day, Skrillex sent his email subscribers a Dropbox link to a new album, F*ck U Skrillex You Think Ur Andy Warhol but Ur Not!! <3. It plays as one continuous mix with a host, the Montreal producer DJ Smokey, whose drops are read by a gravelly radio voice: “Shadow Wizard Skrillex Gang,” “This drop has been seized by Atlantic Records.” The Atlantic line was, Smokey thinks, the first piece he sent Skrillex while they worked on the album, he told Rolling Stone. “And he was like, ‘Holy shit.’ He fucking loved it.”^[1]^[2]

The idea came from rap. Smokey called the drops an homage to the mixtape era, to Trapaholics, Evil Empire and DJ Drama: “One of the funnest things about listening to mixtapes back in the day was the crazy out-of-pocket tags that are clipping 10 times louder than the song.”^[2]

A producer tag is a short recorded signature, usually a voice saying a name, that marks a beat as someone’s work. Rap producers made it a habit. Skrillex is known, in Smokey’s words, for “insane sound design,” and Smokey teased him about it on the album: “I heard that snare took him two years to make.” Below is how dance music has used spoken tags: a dance-pop producer whose singers say his name for him, Marshmello’s line on his rap collaborations, Skrillex from his 2010 debut to the album Smokey hosted, and ISOxo, Yellow Claw and Diplo. For the rap tags these drops imitate, see hip-hop’s greatest producer tags.^[2]

“RedOne” · RedOne

Lady Gaga with a platinum bob, peering through the spread fingers of a black leather glove and holding a microphone, against floral wallpaper

RedOne’s tag was never a recording. The Swedish-Moroccan hitmaker gets his name sung by the artists themselves. In the opening seconds of Lady Gaga’s “Just Dance,” before the first verse, Gaga sings “RedOne” (play: Lady Gaga, “Just Dance,” the RedOne shout-out). Dazed lists the same shout-out on Nicki Minaj’s “Starships” and Pitbull’s “Rain Over Me.”^[3]^[4]

It works like a tag that lives inside the vocal take, so it exists only when the singer agrees to say it.

“Mello made it right!” · Marshmello

Marshmello, the producer and DJ who performs in a giant marshmallow helmet, has a tag in the rap style. On “Project Dreams,” his 2018 hip-hop single with Roddy Ricch, it plays just before the first verse: “Mello made it right!” (play: Marshmello x Roddy Ricch, “Project Dreams,” the tag).^[5]^[6]

Roddy Ricch rapping in the back seat of a car with a starlit headliner, Marshmello in his white helmet beside him

“My name is Skrillex” · Skrillex

Three men standing on the deck of a speedboat on a canal at dusk, one in Joker makeup and a white suit with a cane

Sonny Moore’s first release as Skrillex was an EP he gave away as a free download on June 7, 2010, and its title track opens with a voice saying “My name is Skrillex” (play: Skrillex, “My Name Is Skrillex,” opening), several times over. The name itself meant nothing, he said in 2010; it was left over from an old AOL screen name.^[7]

He has also produced for rappers. In 2016 he made “Purple Lamborghini” with Rick Ross for the Suicide Squad soundtrack, and it reached No. 33 on the Billboard Hot 100. He has won nine Grammy Awards, more than any other electronic dance music act.^[8]^[7]

The host · DJ Smokey

The album’s first track is a 51-second piece credited to Skrillex and DJ Smokey, “SKRILLEX IS DEAD” (play: “Skrillex is fucking dead” — excerpt from “SKRILLEX IS DEAD”), which starts the mix by announcing its own star’s death.^[9]

Smokey came up in the early SoundCloud years making Memphis rap-inspired beats, then worked with Yung Lean and Lil Peep. In 2022 his “Legalize nuclear bombs” tag went viral on TikTok, and a collective of Montreal friends, Shadow Wizard Money Gang, gave him a second hit drop. Varg²™, a producer he already worked with, was helping Skrillex shape the album and told him, “Yo, you got to get Smokey involved.”^[2]

He spent three days in Skrillex’s Los Angeles studio, working in a room next door and running his ideas over. The instruction was loose: “Just go crazy.” Skrillex had already mixed his songs, so Smokey mostly wrote the drops and added sounds between them. The voice is a professional who records radio drops; Smokey would say only that “the guy that I use now has done a lot of old iconic tags.”^[2]

Obviously, the tags are the most important thing and it’s just making it more entertaining to listen to.

DJ Smokey to Rolling Stone, April 2025^[2]

Too much?

Don’t the tags really match the energy of the music when you really think about it?

Anthony Fantano, The Needle Drop, April 2025^[10]

Some listeners found the drops “too much” and “distracting,” Anthony Fantano wrote in his review for The Needle Drop. He understood the complaint, he said, since the jokes sit on top of heavy, carefully built bass music. His examples included “I have Skrillex trapped in my basement. Play this at full volume or I’ll put him in the hole.” He decided the tags suited a record that goes back to “that old-school, super-aggressive, over-the-top strain of Bro-step,” and gave the album “a decent to strong 7.”^[10]

The album reached No. 3 on Billboard’s Top Dance Albums chart. Rolling Stone placed Smokey’s drops alongside the blog-era rap mixtapes and Swamp Izzo’s hosting on Playboi Carti’s Music.^[1]^[2]

ISOxo, Yellow Claw and Diplo

ISOxo, the American DJ behind kidsgonemad!, is credited as a producer on the Skrillex album. He also makes records with Knock2 as ISOKNOCK, whose album 4EVR came out on 88rising on Aug. 1, 2024, and he and Skrillex released a second joint single, “Smoke,” in spring 2026.^[1]^[11]^[12]

He has a tag of his own, and it opens the official video for “IMESSAGE” (play: ISOxo, “IMESSAGE,” official video, opening), which he released on Oct. 22, 2026; the vocals start about 13 seconds in.^[13]

Yellow Claw, the Dutch duo of Jim Taihuttu and Nils Rondhuis, turned a vocal sample into a crowd call. EDM Identity described them in 2023 as “popularly known for playing out their vocal sample of ‘Yellow MF Claw’ to immense crowds.”^[14]^[15]

Diplo formed Jack Ü with Skrillex in 2013. “Jack Ü … means Skrillex and Diplo together,” he explained to MTV. In 2026 his name went on BTS’s Arirang as one of its executive producers, with credits on five tracks.^[7]^[16]

We looked for a recurring spoken tag on Diplo’s releases and did not find one documented by him or by music press.

Diplo, bleached hair and a dark T-shirt, and Walshy Fire, in a cap and varsity jacket, shouting into microphones face to face under blue stage light — Diplo, left, and Walshy Fire of Major Lazer at Flow Festival in Helsinki on Aug. 14, 2015.Photo: Kim Metso/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0, cropped

How we chose

We started from Skrillex, ISOxo and Diplo, added RedOne from Dazed’s list of producer tags and Marshmello and Yellow Claw from further searches, and kept only the tags and drops we could hear on an official upload or read about in an interview or review. Fan lists name tags for other dance producers, Jax Jones among them; we left those out until an official upload or a named publication confirms them.

What a rap tag does on a dance record

On a rap beat, a tag tells you who made it. On the Skrillex album, everyone already knew, so the drops had a different job: they gave a 30-track mix a running voice and a sense of humor. Smokey’s next project, with Varg²™, is a duo they named EDM, and he described its goal in the same interview: “We’re just trying to make EDM super swag and rapper coded.”^[2]