Who Is MPH? The UK Garage Producer Behind Skrillex Collab “Mirage”
A guide to MPH, the Canterbury producer whose UK garage run took him from Night Bass to a Thomas Bangalter co-sign and a Skrillex collaboration.
If “Mirage” was your introduction to MPH, you've got some catching up to do. The Skrillex collaboration that landed this month is the biggest mainstream moment yet for a producer who's spent the last few years quietly becoming one of the most important names in modern UK garage — and the road here is a genuinely great story.
Start with the basics. MPH is Myles Fairbairn, from Canterbury in the UK. He's said he got into DJing after falling down a DJ EZ Boiler Room rabbit hole, started out on FL Studio and a pair of KRK Rokit 5s like half the producers you know, and only switched to Ableton after a studio session with drum and bass veteran DJ Zinc. His influences read like a UKG syllabus: DJ EZ, Todd Edwards, The Streets, Flava D, Champion, Royal-T, DJ Q.
His first proper statement was 132.00FM, a seven-track LP that landed on AC Slater's Night Bass in February 2023. Night Bass had already flagged him as next up, and by then he was getting spins from Skream, Disclosure, Floating Points, Chris Lorenzo and Chris Lake. Glastonbury, Boomtown and Parklife followed. Not bad for a guy whose whole thing is a genre plenty of people had written off as a nostalgia act.
Then October 2025 happened, and it's still the wildest entry on his resume. Thomas Bangalter — yes, that one, half of Daft Punk — played his first DJ set in sixteen years in Paris, and dropped two MPH tracks into it: the then-unreleased “Flex It” and “Raw,” which he mixed straight into Daft Punk's “Digital Love.” MPH found out the way anyone would. “I got woken up at 3 AM by a fan spamming my DMs,” he told MusicRadar. “I looked at the stream and was like, ‘no way!' I'm still in disbelief.”
That same month he put out Substance, a 13-track concept album narrated by UK rapper EV, with features from Chris Lorenzo, Habstrakt, Sparkz, Carla Monroe, AntsLive and Cameron Hayes. It's built to be heard front to back rather than shuffled, which is a bold ask in 2026.
This year's been the acceleration. He made his major label debut in April with “Unconditional” — written, produced and sung by him — which he first tested during a back-to-back with Disclosure on New Year's Eve in San Francisco. He also says he wrote it in about 20 minutes on a flight to Miami. “I just wanted a high-energy club banger, almost like a get-out-of-jail-free card when I'm not sure what to play next in a set,” he said of it. Add a Swedish House Mafia b2b at Ultra Miami, a Calvin Harris remix, a Rinse FM show and a summer running through EDC Las Vegas and Ibiza, and the Skrillex link-up starts looking less like a lottery ticket and more like the obvious next step.
Which brings us back to “Mirage,” out now via DisOrder/Capitol. If UK garage is having a genuine international moment right now, MPH is a big reason why. Keep an eye on this one.
