THREE OF A KIND
SWEDISH HOUSE MAFIA were dance music kings — and then, at the height of their reign, called it quits. Finally together again in Stockholm, they have a new label, new music and a new outlook on reuniting “for life”
Swedish House Mafia were dance music kings — and then, at the height of their reign, called it quits. Finally together again in Stockholm, they have a new label, new music and a new outlook on reuniting “for life.”
OON A PLACID INLET OF THE BALTIC
Sea, where swans glide by the European sports cars parked across the road, the Djursholm Country
Club looms behind a red brick wall with a black iron gate. Built in 1907 with a fortune tied to the Nobel Prize, this villa was originally a private residence, and later a convent where Pope John Paul II stayed. About five years ago, a group of locals transformed it into a private oasis for the wealthy and well-connected in and around Djursholm — a district in the most affluent municipality in Sweden, where Spotify founder Daniel Ek and ABBA’s Björn Ulvaeus are neighbors.
On this humid evening just before Sweden’s Midsommar, the clean-cut members and their guests socialize on the outdoor patio, their small children sitting politely at a separate table. But amid this sanctuary of Nordic gentility, in a corner of the patio closest to the designated smoking section, sits a trio of men instantly recognizable in Sweden and, once upon a time, to any dance music fan around the world: the game-changing threesome Swedish House Mafia.
Axwell (born Axel Hedfors), 43, is the fine-featured one with the dry sense of humor; wearing a striped shirt and shorts and sipping a beer, he blends in easily enough. His tattooed cohorts look more like off-duty rock stars: Sebastian Ingrosso, 38, has a booming laugh and wears stylish athleisure (black sweatpants, black T-shirt, gold neck chain), and Steve Angello, 38, the group’s sober member, drinks a ginger ale, occasionally pulling back his mane of graying hair to reveal the ink on his arms. Twice during a dinner of burrata, French fries, mushrooms, fish tacos and garlic shrimp, Angello and Ingrosso go off to smoke thin Vogue cigarettes. Axwell vapes at the table.
The Swedes, as they’re known in the dance music industry, aren’t actually that unusual a sight here: Axwell and Ingrosso are both members of the country club and live nearby with their wives and children; Angello and his family aren’t far away in central Stockholm. But their presence out in the open as a trio, sharing a friendly meal with two journalists, is far more unexpected. It has been eight years since they broke up with significant fanfare; about that long since they sat down for an interview as a group; and 20 months since they shut down their group social media accounts and essentially disappeared. Now they’re finally ready to talk about where they’ve been, what they’ve been working on and why, after one major false start, their real comeback is imminent.
“When we came back together again, it was like we had to rediscover
From left: Angello, Ingrosso and Axwell. what this was,” says Angello, sweeping his hand across the table. “We all have our different likings, obviously. [But then] Seb shows me something, or Ax shows me something I have never seen or heard, and it becomes this magic again that we had when we were young.”
More than any other act in modern dance music, Swedish House Mafia set the tone for the EDM boom of the early 2010s, taking the massive “big room” house sound cultivated in Europe to the United States. Here, they set new standards for what success could look like for dance acts, selling out Madison Square Garden twice (the first time, in December 2011, in nine minutes), gaining mass popularity as the first generation of digital natives flocked to mega-festivals like
Ultra and Electric Daisy Carnival.
The scene was bright and loud, and between the music, confetti, pyro (and the drugs) at the Swedes’ shows, often euphoric. Almost from day one, Swedish House Mafia created a live experience “with even more swagger, more panache and more production” than had been attempted before by other DJs, says Pete Tong, the long-standing BBC Radio 1 host and dance scene legend. “The Swedes really aligned with the emergence and explosion of EDM in America. They were kind of the leading protagonists of what became the next big global wave in terms of the impact of DJs and what they could achieve.”
Incredibly, the group created all that on the strength of only a six-track, two-compilation catalog — with its last release, 2012’s “Don’t You Worry Child,” becoming its biggest hit by far when it spent three weeks at No. 6 on the Billboard Hot 100. And then, at the height of its success in 2013, the trio broke up, devastating and shocking dance fans worldwide.
Five years later, it seemed like the group might reunite when it closed out Ultra’s 20th anniversary in Miami. But, as the members now say, behindthe-scenes problems at that show underscored just how much of a change a true reunion would have necessitated. Over the next three years, they made attempts at new music but were derailed at every turn — fighting their own well-known perfectionism, changing managers twice and ultimately leaving the label, Columbia Records, that signed them when they had only bits and pieces of new music.
Now they’re returning to an industry that has changed considerably since their days in the Hot 100’s top 10. House, techno and tech house are the genres of choice within the dance scene — not the bombastic, often anthemic, larger-than-life “main stage” sound with which the Swedes made their name. Although initially all successful underground DJs in their own right, they “almost got hampered by their own success” as a vastly more mainstream supergroup, says Tong. “They defined a genre in such a specific way.” The marquee acts of their era — Calvin Harris, David Guetta, Skrillex and deadmau5 — survived by evolving their sounds and thus, well, never really going away.
Dance music, too, isn’t the U.S. market juggernaut it was in the early and mid-2010s. In 2016, the global dance music industry was valued at $7.1 billion — a historic high amid the U.S. scene’s heyday — and that same year, the genre accounted for a record 4% market share of U.S. recorded music. That number dipped to 3.6% before the pandemic, according to the IMS Business Report, and a 2021 IMS analysis of Spotify’s top 200 indicates that dance music is declining almost everywhere.
Still, while its popularity may have leveled off in the United States, it’s surging in developing countries like India and China, as well as in parts of Latin America, where the EDM boom arrived later and where streaming consumption is rising rapidly. And it’s amid these changing consumption patterns that Swedish House Mafia is starting fresh: a new team, a global tour backed by Live Nation, new music and, more crucially, a new sound — one the group insists will frame it as anything but a nostalgia act.
“It was just like, ‘What the fuck do we do? How do we come back? Do we just give them another [version of ] what we’ve done before?’ ” Ingrosso recalls the group thinking as it mulled a comeback. “I was like, ‘Fuck that; it’s depressing to go back. It’s disgusting to go back.’ ” And its first new single, “It Gets Better,” certainly doesn’t sound retro: A sleek, imposing amalgamation of punchy beats, walls of synth and quick 180s into drops composed of what appears to be cowbell, it is, the group promises, just the start of more new music leading up to Swedish House Mafia’s debut album, Paradise Again, planned for a late-2021 release.
It’s a make-or-break moment, one that will decide if the most successful act of the dance music boom — and part of the genre’s “first generation to get old,” as Tong puts it — can exist beyond that era. But the Swedes — who these days live quite comfortably in a country where their celebrity status is cemented — say they aren’t seeking massive streaming numbers or a big album payday. As they put it, they’re simply three restless, creative guys who want to finally get their music out, regardless of how it’s received, and to prove they can chart a new course away from mainstream dance music, which, laments Ingrosso, has of late all “sounded the same.”
“I’m not trying to like, satisfy the digital market,” says Angello. “My big play here is making an album we love and putting it out. I’m not going to go into the studio and call the guys and be like, ‘Yo, numbers are cold on the playlist.’ We don’t give a fuck.”
“We have no idea if people are going to like [the new music],” adds Ingrosso. “But we are just really proud of what we have done.”
SWEDISH HOUSE MAFIA
has never done anything less than full throttle, and even its last goodbye was outsized. In April 2012, two months after becoming the first EDM act to get top Coachella billing, the trio announced it was breaking up — but first, it would embark upon a 52-date, five-continent-spanning trek called One Last Tour, which ended up grossing an average of $1.18 million per show, according to Billboard Boxscore, and was chronicled in the 2014 documentary Leave the World Behind.
For fans, the doc was a kind of EDM Rosetta stone, offering some insights into why a group at the peak of its powers would just walk away. It positioned the Swedes as best friends who, while thrilled by their jobs, were often discontented with life on the road and, on occasion, with one another. In one scene, during a 2011 writing trip to Australia (where they plan to hole up in the studio and finish “Don’t You
“WHEN WE CAME BACK TOGETHER AGAIN, IT WAS LIKE WE HAD TO REDISCOVER WHAT THIS WAS.” —Angello
Worry Child”), Angello leaves a session to go get a neck tattoo — a move Axwell calls “retarded” once Angello has left the room.
“That was three hours,” says Angello today in his defense, the infamous angel tat peering out from the collar of his T-shirt. “The song took two years to make.”
Still, the moment underlined a recurring idea in the film: The guys pulled the plug because none of them could totally commit. “The problem was that Swedish House Mafia grew really fast, and we had our individual careers as well,” says Axwell. “Swedish House Mafia took over, and so we were like, ‘What are we doing? Are we focusing on this? But I have this other thing also.’ We were not good at balancing that, and we were also not ready to fully ditch our individual careers and commit to Swedish House Mafia, which it felt like it needed.”
The film also hinted at deeper