deadmau5, who later said he had blacked out, had his sound cut during his and ZHU’s performance at Coachella 2025.
Move over, Grimes — the new Coachella disaster just dropped, and it’s a doozy. deadmau5 has a penchant for acting dismissive and unbothered during his DJ sets, but he took it to an extreme at during his b2b with ZHU at the Quasar stage on Friday night.
Videos appear to show deadmau5 (real name Joel Zimmerman), who was billed under his Testpilot techno alias, taking shots, mixing badly, and even falling over on stage. The sound then abruptly stopped before the set was supposed to end. Zimmerman said over the mic, “They were actually like, ‘That’s it.’ Goodnight! Thank you so much!”
Zimmerman later addressed the incident in two Instagram posts of varying seriousness. “I dont remember a thing. But I don’t think I had a cig? So… that’s good I guess?” reads the first one alongside a photo of a water bottle, referring to previous posts in which he said he was quitting smoking. “Going back to bed. Wake me up around Thursday ish.”
“Man, even my cat is disappointed in me. Tho, it could be argued that she always has been. sorry about last night,” reads the second one, captioning a photo of his cat. “TO BE FAIR, I felt the first 3/4 was great! Huge shout out to ZHU for introducing me to whisky and carrying my dumb ass till the bitter end.”
Longtime followers of Zimmerman will find the incident ironic given his previous attitudes on glorifying controlled substances. In 2012, he publicly blasted Madonna for jokingly asking “has anyone seen Molly” on the Ultra Music Festival Mainstage. He later wrote on his website, “I’m not pro, or anti-drug, but I’ll easily let you know that I’m pro-responsibility.”
In a comment on his first Instagram post, Zimmerman remarked that this was “Probably my last coachella show.” And that’s fair — we would be too ashamed to walk back into a festival where we had made that kind of a scene ourselves.
