The SNDCLSH is a music collaboration between longtime friends Lupe Fiasco and Sky Gellatly. The two met in 2005 during the original press run for Fiasco's debut Hip-Hop album Food and Liquor; Gellatly, then a journalist, interviewed Fiasco and the pair discovered a shared respect for music, politics, and art. Since then, the two have remained friends, collaborating on several editorial, music video, and fashion projects. Whereas Fiasco is best-known as a Grammy-winning MC, and Gellatly as a marketing strategist (Managing Partner, Team Epiphany) and artist manager (13th Witness, DJ Neil Armstrong, and FUTURA), the SNDCLSH is their collaborative vision on DJ performance, electronic music, philanthropy, and design.

In 2011, the two found a shared desire to create a live DJ show that would meld high-energy performance with the duo's somewhat sprawling tastes in music. After performing across the United States, the two decided that they had to add to the canon of electronic music that they gravitated towards in their live performances; in late 2011, they began working on their debut release.

Their independently-released EP, Don't Drop The Flag, was created to accomplish two primary goals: on the one hand, to serve as a philanthropic mechanism to raise money for children in need in Chicago (all of the album's profits are being donated to children in Chicago), and on the other, to introduce the pair's evolving take on electronic music to whoever will listen. Through their debut EP, the SNDCLSH hope that other artists will use creative expression as a way to raise money for others in need, and to reignite the notion that the best collaborations are often those created outside of the box, and as a challenging creative exercise between friends.