By @JustinWetch

When Hazed was eight years old, he went to a friend's house and watched him play Call of Duty. Not just play it, but record it, edit the clips together with music, sync the kills to the beat drops. A niche movement of kids making gaming montages before that was a mainstream thing to do, and Hazed was immediately gone on it. He begged his mom for a capture card. Had to wait until Christmas. Got it. By nine he was teaching himself Sony Vegas, cutting footage, choosing tracks, learning the rhythm of an edit without knowing that's what he was learning.

He was always introverted, always daydreaming in class, always somewhere else while the other kids played football. The montages gave that inner world an outlet and a community of people who cared about the same weird thing. He and @Jesperish were in the same gaming team, SoaR, years before either of them made art.

"I always knew that feeling of being in the flow state," Hazed says. "You just get completely absorbed in your own world of creating whatever you're doing. I definitely chased that feeling, but it was never a straightforward path."

Around fifteen or sixteen, music took over. Hazed got obsessed the way teenagers do, but one album went deeper than the rest. Tame Impala's Lonerism felt like it was narrating his interior life back to him, an introvert who feels disconnected from the world around him, wrapped up in this huge dreamy psychedelic analog sound. Kevin Parker was combining '70s synths and old drum machines with modern technology and effects, layering textures from completely different eras into something that felt like its own universe.

"He was kinda like the introvert champion to me," Hazed says.

The creative blueprint landed and never left. The idea of taking elements that don't obviously belong together and processing them into something new, that's still the core of what Hazed does. He started producing his own music but never shared it, the confidence wasn't there. He did put out remixes inspired by Daft Punk's approach of reconstructing existing material, and those did well, a million views across YouTube by sixteen or seventeen, before the channel got hacked and the early work vanished.

But the deeper loss was self-inflicted. The people around him kept saying the same thing: it's not gonna make you any money, you need to get a real job. So he stopped creating. He gave it all up.

"I didn't know it at the time," Hazed says. "That I needed to create to survive."

Hazed grew up in a working-class area of England where factory jobs and manual labor were the default and creative ambitions were treated as a waste of time. He never moved away. He had no art education, no formal training, no support structure for the creative instincts he kept showing. The message was clear and constant: if it doesn't make money, it's pointless.

So he tried to fit in. Job after job, none of them right, all of them chosen because they were what everyone else was doing. There's a culture in Britain he describes as living for the weekend, just getting through the days until you're allowed to stop. Trying to be normal because it felt easier than accepting he was a little bit different.

"The theme of a lot of my formative years was feeling lost," he says, "and a deep sense of insecurity of who I was. A huge lack of identity."

The years without creating were the worst of his life. He's honest about that without going into heavy detail: the emptiness that came from abandoning the one thing that gave him purpose sent him to a place he didn't think he'd come back from. When he's not making things, he falls apart. It took him a long time to understand that creating wasn't a hobby or a career aspiration but something closer to breathing.

COVID arrived and the Hazed Lockdown handle was born, a Twitter name for the moment that ended up sticking. He reconnected briefly with the old gaming community, but his daily reality was grimmer than that. He'd taken a job with his dad, a welder of forty years, in a factory. Cuts, bruises, burns, heavy machinery. He was the youngest person there, and people kept walking up to him asking what he was doing.

"It was like another place that I don't belong," he says.

When the company laid him off, he was directionless again. But around that same time he met Chloe, an artist herself, the first person in his real life who actually encouraged his creative instincts. She inspired him to open Photoshop and try.

He made a piece called Losing Myself. A portrait, processed and distorted, the face recognizable but degraded, like a signal breaking apart. It was personal in a way he hadn't attempted before, and he wasn't going to share it. Chloe pushed him. You've only got a hundred followers, she told him. No one's going to say anything bad. It's a great piece. Go share it.

He did. And somehow the on-chain art community found it. Artists he admired started sharing it and saying things he'd never heard anyone say about his work. For the first time, he felt self-belief.

"That pushed me on to keep doing it," he says. "And then from there, I just ran with it."

Losing Myself is still his profile picture. He didn't start taking art seriously until 2022, and he's candid about that. He got into this late. He's fine with it.

The process is where Hazed lives. He starts by sourcing footage, sometimes spending days in obscure corners of the internet looking for material he can completely destroy and turn into his own thing. When he can't find what he needs, he films it himself. For Soul Searching, he needed someone in a Grim Reaper costume standing in a river, so his girlfriend Chloe stood in a freezing lake in Ireland while he filmed. The shot appears for about two seconds.

Once he has raw material, the processing begins. He runs footage through analog hardware from the '90s and 2000s, manually distorting the signal, then captures it back into his computer or outputs it to CRT monitors and old displays that add their own texture and displacement. He might film that screen with a Sony Hi8 camcorder, print the result, scan it back in. He's extracted a walking loop from a glitching PS1 game by isolating a bugged character and rebuilding the whole thing from there. Every source is an opportunity.

For many pieces, he prints every single frame of the video onto hundreds of pages and manually alters each one. Texturing with paint, crayons, scratching, cutting, sticking. Then he scans them back in and sequences them together.

"It's kinda like Photoshop layers, but in real life," he says. "You keep adding these different states of processing, and it always gets to a place where it just feels distinctive."

The sound design follows the same logic. He scratches a texture in his room, records it, plays it through an old radio, re-records that on his phone, drops it into Ableton. Layer after layer of analog degradation until the audio matches the visual world.

"Hazed is the machine that processes everything around it," he says. "It's like a reconstructed, distorted version of the world."

Years after Lonerism rewired his brain, Hazed went on to work with the man who had inspired him. He'd reached out to Tame Impala's creative director the same way he had reached out for the Suicideboys tour, by taking the initiative, reconstructing their existing footage in his own style, and sending it over as a proof of concept. The director kept him in the loop as the project developed, reporting back that Kevin had seen the work and liked it.

"Oh, shit," Hazed remembers thinking. "That's crazy."

His name is in the credits of a Tame Impala music video now. He never spoke to Parker directly, but the full circle closed anyway.

The Suicideboys commission happened because he cold-messaged the project's creative director, not expecting a reply. Five minutes later: "Are you free to jump on a call?" He thought he'd be making an Instagram reel. Instead, the director screen-shared a tour layout with a sixty-foot vertical screen behind the stage and asked if Hazed wanted to create the visuals for an arena tour across America.

"I won't pretend like I wasn't shitting myself," Hazed says. "But if I let the idea that I didn't have enough experience defeat me, I would have never gone through with it."

He learned on the job, filmed his own footage, processed it through every method he knew and a few he invented along the way. Then he flew to America for the first time in his life, went to the show in Atlanta, and watched his distorted reality projected sixty feet tall behind a band performing for thousands.

Not everything has to have super deep meaning, Hazed says. It just has to come from a genuine place. He doesn't want to box himself into any single theme. The work is a combination of elements processed into one reality, his reality, and when you look at it you're stepping into a daydream and seeing the world through whatever's happening inside his head. The authenticity is the point. The process is everything.

Supporters who've mattered: @jon_harry7, a collector who collects purely out of passion for what he sees and who collected Final Touch, the piece Hazed displayed in Times Square. @DrLeeNFT, a fellow Brit who's always encouraging him to push further and come out of his shell. And @Inspector_9, who may not own a piece but has supported Hazed since early on and highlights artists every single day.

Artists inspiring him lately: @oliviapedi, whose work feels like a personal internet journal. @PERFECTL00P, whose work speaks for itself. And @adhd143, whose creative energy Hazed finds endlessly inspiring.

For future Weekly Dose episodes, @hazedlockdown recommends @Oaknarrow, @PERFECTL00P, and @adhd143.