Adams' career blew up unexpectedly in 2008 after he sent Diplo a grimy remix of the Black Lips' "Veni Vedi Vici." Diplo swiftly signed him to his Mad Decent label and set him up with other high-profile remix projects for Santigold and Gucci Mane. Adams' defining release of his period was a 17-track mixtape entitled Different Circles. Heavily influenced by his intense tour schedule, the tape ran the gamut Baltimore gutter to calypso, techno, indie pop, and grime, and integrated global styles he was discovering at the time from Cairo, Sao Paulo, and Mexico.

Burnt out on touring, Adams then took a two-year hiatus to recalibrate his sound. He officially announced the second wave of his career with the Twists and Turns mixtape, which drew influences from jungle, garage, and even shoegaze. With solo EPs on Rinse and Unknown to the Unknown under his belt, he also began collaborating with young MC Novelist, which yielded a string of much-hyped instrumental grime tracks released on XL Recordings.

In 2014, he and fellow grime deconstructionist Logos launched the Different Circles label and podcast, helping to coin the "weightless grime" subgenre. Following previous joint releases on Keysound and Tectonic, their collaborative LP, Proto, dropped in 2015. As Resident Advisor wrote, "Their work is rooted in the past yet still fresh and modern, taking classic tropes and brazenly throwing them into new configurations. While the two have conjured up the ghosts of OG grime in the past, Proto looks back even further than that, homing in on a time in the early '90s when dance music was prone to rapid mutation."

These days, Adams also performs an all-analogue live set alongside Shapednoise and Logos as The Sprawl, which debuted at CTM Festival in 2015.