Getty Image / Kevin Mazur / Contributor
No one.
You couldn’t leave your house without hearing “Levels” or “Seek Bromance” from 2011 – 2013. It was in the background at ever bar. Every party. Every tailgate or sporting event. He filled college arenas, Vegas clubs, and massive music festival main stages. The man was a hit machine: “Levels,” “Wake Me Up,” “I Could Be The One,” “Hey Brother,” “Without You.”
Monster anthems, all produced at breakneck pace and a ferocious work ethic. All the while, a touring schedule that was a constant grind.
He ushered in an EDM gold rush that, looking back from 2019 at the first part of the decade decade, feels like a bubble that popped.
In 2018, the news of Avicii’s death at 28 rattled a generation of millennials who felt like they were growing up with him; maturing with his success, if you will.
Even when Avicii took time off from touring because of health problems, the EDM world around Avicii kept moving at a breakneck pace.
That just made the shock of his death all the deeper.
Avicii’s mentor, David Guetta, talks about this in a recent interview with Rolling Stone:
Guetta says that Avicii would, at first, laugh off his advice with, “David, you’re getting old — I’m full of energy.” But then he caught up with Avicii at an Ultra festival around 2014 and, he says, “It was hard for me to pretend like everything was normal and good, you know? He lost so much weight at some point of his life. He had problems with his stomach and then he couldn’t eat. He was so skinny and already sick.”
…
As to his own theories about what happened that still mysterious day in Oman, Guetta pauses and ultimately begs off: “I don’t know more than what people said. I don’t know. Tim had a problem. We all knew there was a problem. I could see he wasn’t happy. So it’s not like it came out of nowhere. But it made me a little mad, to be honest, because it’s almost like you could see it coming. I didn’t think it was going to be to that extent. It just went too much in the dark side.”
Earlier this week, Guetta took the stage for an Avicii tribute concert in the DJ’s hometown of Stockholm. About 60,000 fans filled Stockholm’s Friends Arena. Proceeds with to the Tim Bergling Foundation, working to raise support for mental health issues.
In addition to a number of performances, Guetta took the stage to release a never-before heard song he produced with Avicii, along with Afrojack and Giorgio.
“This is a record I’ve never played before,” Guetta told the crowd. “And I felt this was the right time.”
“This is the very first time I’ve played it, and will probably be the last.”
Here are a few more videos from the Avicii tribute concert:
Levels straight up gives me chills: