Major Lazer started in 2008 as a side project between Diplo and a producer named Switch, who'd met years earlier working on M.I.A.'s first album — the dancehall-and-EDM hybrid they built together on 2009's Guns Don't Kill People... Lazers Do arrived right as EDM was becoming a mainstream festival genre, and the timing mattered as much as the sound.
Switch left after three years; Jillionaire and Walshy Fire took his place, and the group's global-bass, genre-collision approach has stayed roughly the same since, built to work as easily in a dancehall set as an EDM one.
Diplo — Thomas Wesley Pentz, a Tupelo, Mississippi-born, Philadelphia-raised DJ who'd already built Mad Decent and a career producing for Britney Spears and Beyoncé before any of this — has kept working steadily outside Major Lazer too, releasing country-adjacent records under his own Thomas Wesley alias and a run of 2025-2026 singles, splitting his time between the group and a genuinely restless solo catalog.