DJ Shadow rose to national prominence with the 1996 release of his first full-length album Endtroducing...... Built entirely from audio samples, the album received world-wide critical acclaim. Spin magazine went so far as to call it, "a stone classic, channeling Afrika Bambaataa's genre-splicing, DJ-booth mysticism into a fully realized studio epic." The Alternative Press called it, "an undeniable hip-hop masterpiece."

Shadown followed Entroducing..... with a compilation of singles and a score for the 2000 documentary '"Dark Days. In 2002, he released his second full-length album of original productions, called The Private Press. A video for the track "Six Days", directed by Hong Kong auteur Wong Kar-wai, was released in conjunction with the album. In 2006, he released The Outsider and has been touring since that time.

DJ Shadow was featuring prominently in the documentary Scratch, has collaborated with such artists as DJ Cut Chemist and Kid Koala and was once a member of UNKLE with producers James Lavelle and Tim Goldsworthy.