Shadow Wizard Money Gang is real, and if you’ve heard their chant, “we love casting spells” you’re already in it. No signup or invitation. The moment the tag hit your ears, you were initiated.
Born in Montréal’s cold streets and warmer basements, the collective sits somewhere between myth and philosophy. What spread as a viral meme became an entire underground movement, fashion, sound, and visual mayhem shaped by a handful of young artists who made the unreal feel inevitable.
Before Louka met DJ Smokey, there was no name, no plan, and no clear idea of what they were building. Just a group of friends making art together. Louka and Tommy met in art school and wanted to be famous painters. They spent their time creating, experimenting, and hanging around with other young artists who shared the same hunger. Back then, there was no Shadow Wizard Money Gang, only a handful of eccentric kids trying to make something out of nothing.
They started organizing small pop-ups to show their work, because no one else was going to do it for them. These events had long flyers filled with names, featuring their friends, classmates, and anyone who wanted to be part of it. They printed shirts, handed them out for free on the street, and built a local reputation as the “Shadow Wizards,” even before the name officially stuck. Montréal residents from that time still remember the sight of Louka and his friends giving away shirts and flyers on cold nights, hustling art with no audience and no money.
The “Shadow Wizard” idea came later. The group was working on a magazine meant to showcase Montréal’s emerging art scene, and they needed a title. Louka came up with the name on a whim. It was strange, funny, and perfect. Eventually, they started using it for everything, flyers, events, collective projects, and the Shadow Wizard name became their identity.
Not every product is made under the collective name, but everything they do carries the energy of Shadow Wizards. Some drops are personal projects, others are group efforts, but all of it, in some way, belongs to their shared universe.
A New Chapter: DJ Smokey Arrives
The meeting with DJ Smokey happened when the group was starting to gain attention online. They were posting funny reels, outrageous outfits, and unfiltered behind-the-scenes clips that spread fast. Most people thought it was a joke, but Smokey saw something real in it.
At the time, Smokey had just moved from Ontario to Montréal. He was a veteran of the underground scene, known as a pioneer of the phonk sound, but feeling burned out. When he saw Louka and Vincent in their extreme fits, green hair, multiple belts, oversized layers, he reached out to plan a business meeting. “I didn’t know what we were meeting for, I just thought these guys were fresh.” Smokey would later say.
Over coffee, Louka explained the meaning behind “Shadow Wizard Money Gang,” and Smokey loved it. He was working on a new wave of music he called “Nuke,” built on chaotic drums and absurdly intense sound design. Tags like “Legalize nuclear bombs” and “Call the fire department, we just nuked the building” were part of that sound, but one tag would become something else entirely: “Shadow Wizard Money Gang, we love casting spells.” That was their first collaboration, Smokey gave the tag to Joeyy for his track “Gout” and it changed everything.
Louka was already experimenting with his own brand of experimental electronic music, so he and Smokey naturally began producing together. In the music world, Louka himself became “Shadow Wizard Money Gang.” When you see that name on a track, whether it’s hosted, tagged, or produced by, that’s him.
Their rise was helped by a wave of collaborations that formed around this moment. They worked with Shed Theory, BBY Goyard, David Shawty, and Joeyy, artists who were also redefining the underground internet sound at the time. These networks fueled each other’s growth, blending online myth and real creative exchange.
At the same time, a separate meme culture started forming online, detached from the real artists. On YouTube and TikTok, fans built an entire fantasy world around the phrase “Shadow Wizard Money Gang.” They made characters, costumes, and lore that had nothing to do with the original group. Some of those costumes are sold on Amazon now. People even dress as “shadow wizards” at conventions, or use the name in games like World of Warcraft.
Ironically, the fantasy version reflects what inspired the real Shadow Wizards in the first place, video games, chaos, and early internet culture. While the meme exploded, Louka, Tommy, Vincent, and Lightelf stayed in Montréal, creating art and evolving their craft. The online wave may have peaked, but their real work only keeps growing. They’ve built steady careers and found recognition far beyond the viral moment that started it all.
Each Shadow Wizard turns their own version of magic into creation.
The Wizards’ Circle: Tommy Jack Oddo Verdier
Tommyblurs fashion, sculpture, and performance. He started as a painter, then got bored. He began screen printing, spray-painting thrifted clothes, and turning logos inside out. His first hits were simple but clever: Canada Goose reimagined as “Shadow Wizard,” Polo’s horse replaced by a wizard on horseback. Then came the “Goblin Hoodies” with long, pointed ears, his first viral moment online.
People started noticing the work because it didn’t look like anything else. It wasn’t polished or luxury, just wild and honest. Verdier kept experimenting, fusing humor with craft. The more he made, the more he learned. His style grew sharper, his silhouettes stranger. He began designing from scratch, cutting and sewing his own patterns.
Verdier draws heavy influence from Jeremy Scott, Walter Van Beirendonck, and Asspizza, but his approach is rooted in humor and independence. He says working with the collective lets him escape and be himself again. “Shadow Wizard is like my funny escape to do more funny, and like, crazier projects,” he told sabukaru.
Recently, Vincent’s basketball shorts quickly became a quiet cult item, worn by Lil Yachty, Kerwin Frost, Sukii Baby, and Bol Bol. His bags, shredded and stained, look broken but are crafted with obsessive care. Everything has a hidden joke or twist. Some shorts are too long to function. Some hoodies have fake straps that look like backpacks. He calls these moments the “wink” in his work, designs that make you look twice.
He’s deeply inspired by Asspizza but wants to be seen as more than the “funny guy” from the Shadow Wizard page. “I take a lot of pride in what I do,” he told us, “the irony, or the funny stuff should shine through the design.” That’s why his recent collections look cleaner and more structured. He doesn’t post as many goofy clips or outlandish fits anymore, but that humor still lives inside the work.
“My short term goal for Shadow Wizards is the same that it’s always been. Hang out with my homies and when we come up with something good, we make it happen.”
Vincent doesn’t care about selling out or chasing fame. For him, the best part of all this is the community, the late nights with his friends, the shared energy, the joy of creating without permission.
The Wizards’ Circle: Lightelf
Lightelf is the collective’s visual architect. His world lives online, built from pixels, 2000s nostalgia, and dream logic. He’s been designing for years, and music is his main inspiration. His graphics mix fantasy, spirituality, and early-internet chaos, often glowing in his favorite palette of purple and white.
He got his start on Tumblr art forums linked to the Drain Gang aesthetic, tight-knit, anonymous communities where young artists learned from each other. That’s where he taught himself to design, starting by copying others until he found his own rhythm. He says the process was about “creating art that means more to me than it does anyone else.”
A lot of Lightelf’s proudest work comes from album covers, especially for DJ Smokey. Many of Smokey’s “Nuke” era visuals, the covers that became iconic for that sound, actually came from Lightelf’s imagination. He helped define the look of that entire era.
In 2023, he took that aesthetic into the real world with his first solo event in Montréal. He released a small collection of rave-inspired clothing and DJed alongside Louka and Smokey. The night was packed, and fans flew in from other cities just to see it. For him, it was proof that digital worlds can become physical experiences.
Together, Tommy, Vincent, and Lightelf make up the creative circle with Louka. They each move differently but share the same code: keep learning, keep experimenting, and don’t take any of it too seriously. The collective’s power comes from that mix of friendship and obsession.
From Nothing to Everything: Louka Tessier
Louka’s story sits at the center of the Shadow Wizard myth. He came from almost nothing and built everything from that space. Both of his parents were circus artists, not the birthday clown kind, but real performers and actors who worked with Cirque du Soleil. He grew up seeing that it was possible to live as an artist, even if it meant living outside the system.
“You can’t have clown parents and not be a little bit funny,” he told sabukaru. “I know I may seem a little bit eccentric sometimes, but I'm really like the quiet child in my family.”
As a kid, Louka moved to Florida, where his parents worked in the circus, before eventually returning to a small town outside Montréal. He grew up rural and restless, watching the world from the margins. When he finally moved back to Montréal, he went all in on being an artist, even if it meant living broke. He used to steal food just to eat. “The day I met Smokey I got caught stealing from the grocery store. I haven't stolen anything in 3 years, since meeting him,” he said. Meeting Smokey marks the shift, one day he was surviving, and the next he was building something that would change his life.
Louka’s music exists in two worlds. One side makes beats for rappers, loud, distorted, and extreme versions of trap music that he calls “clapped out.” The other is what he describes as “ghetto electronic music,” a chaotic mix of hardstyle, breakcore, internet noise, and dark humor. His sound draws from creepypastas, video games, and the weird corners of online culture.
He started out working with local rappers because he loved underground gangster rap, especially the raw, aggressive kind that came out of Québec. Over time, his music started to reach bigger names: Babytron, Lazer Dim 700, Shed Theory, DJ Smokey, BBY Goyard, Matt Ox, Brennan Jones. He even landed tags on Skrillex’s latest album, alongside DJ Smokey.
Louka also designs clothes that reflect the same visual world as his music: dark internet references, horror aesthetics, and meme culture. His look, green hair, stacked belts, exaggerated silhouettes, made him an instantly recognizable figure online. But behind the antics, he’s calm, thoughtful, and articulate. People might come for the chaos, but they stay for the vision.
The collective around him mirrors that balance between absurdity and sincerity. They turned scarcity into spectacle, dropping small runs of clothes, shooting self-made documentaries, performing like every show is a ritual. They laugh at the system while quietly rewriting it.
What started as a meme now lives across fashion campaigns, club speakers, and timelines. The tag “Shadow Wizard Money Gang, we love casting spells” became a cultural timestamp. Yet for Louka and the others, nothing really changed. They still live the same way, making, experimenting, moving forward.
For them, art isn’t a career plan. It’s a way of staying alive.
The Montréal Mutation
Montréal has always had its own kind of underground. Half European, half North American, shaped by freezing winters, cheap rent, and strange ambition. The city has a long history of art collectives, but the Shadow Wizards feels like a new mutation of that energy. Part DIY, part internet-native, and completely unfiltered.
The members all grew up speaking French, which gives their work another layer of isolation. Québec culture rarely gets the global spotlight, especially online. For the Shadow Wizards, that’s part of the pride. “There’s definitely a trend to not say where you’re from, if you’re not from New York or LA. But we’re from Montréal, that's our home.” says Vincent. They represent a version of Montréal that the rest of the world doesn’t often see: bilingual, experimental, and deeply self-taught.
Montréal has always been called the art capital of Canada, but it went quiet for a while. Louka, Tommy, Vincent, and Lightelf helped make it cool again for a new generation of underground kids. They built everything themselves, events, visuals, merch, music, and pulled people in through raw output rather than marketing.
They came from warehouse shows, bedroom studios, and back-alley photoshoots. No one gave them permission, and no one told them how to do it. Their collective energy made the city feel alive again. When most artists were waiting for validation, they were already moving. Selling pieces directly. Dropping short films. Uploading unreleased tracks and unfinished edits.
What connects them isn’t style or genre, it’s intensity. Every post, hoodie, or video feels like it was made with the same urgency as their first pop-up. Their feeds aren’t curated campaigns; they’re chaotic archives of real life. Clips of shows, inside jokes, grainy photos, moments of creation that blur the line between documentation and art.
Montréal is full of talented people, but the Shadow Wizards turned that talent into mythology. They made the city feel like a world again, one that belongs to the kids who never waited for anyone’s approval.
The Spellbook Never Closes
Shadow Wizard Money Gang isn’t a brand or even a collective in the traditional sense. It’s a worldview. A belief that chaos can be art, that poverty can create beauty, and that the internet can still give birth to something real.
Every piece they make is an incantation in a growing spellbook. Vincent’s shredded backpacks, Tommy’s surreal jewelry, Louka’s distorted visuals, and Lightelf’s cyber-occult graphics all feed the same current. Each of them channels their own craft into something that feels alive.
The meme that started it all wasn’t an accident. It was prophecy. And now, that prophecy has a headquarters in Montréal.
“Seeing everyone getting success with what they do,” DJ Smokey tells sabukaru, “it makes me really happy. I’m proud of you guys. So much came from us meeting and gradually doing more shit together. I don’t know, sometimes it feels like some bound to happen shit.”
The group keeps growing, with collaborations that stretch far beyond their beginnings: Asspizza / Bam Margera drops, major music projects, a Skrillex merch collaboration, and more in motion. Yet what makes it last isn’t the hype. It’s the fact that they’re still doing it for the same reason they started, to make art with their friends.
Louka, Vincent, Tommy, and Lightelf built their world out of nothing but instinct. And somehow, the rest of the world is catching up.
It’s not the end of the spell. It’s only the beginning.
Sabukaru visited the crew in Montréal to capture the magic behind their art and process. Watch the full story unfold on YouTube.
