Dance

Per Sundin had seen the future.
Then the President of Universal Music Nordic, Sundin was invited to Ibiza to see Swedish House Mafia play their 2008 residency at Pacha.

“It was like, ‘When are they going on stage? Half past two? In the morning? Oh my god,’” recalls Sundin, who at this time was not yet fully steeped in dance music’s late-night culture. At Pacha he ventured onto the dancefloor amidst a massive crowd “fist-pumping towards the DJ booth.” It was then he knew: “This is the future of pop.”

Back in Stockholm, Sundin looked around for his own dance act to sign, eventually connecting with a young Swedish producer then going by Tim Berg, along with the artist’s manager, Ash Pournouri. Sundin signed the artist’s 2010 debut single, “Seek Bromance.” The label and the producer, who was by then going by Avicii, followed that with 2012’s “Fade Into Darkness” — and then, of course, the era-defining global phenomenon that was “Levels.”

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But the biggest success was yet to come.

Avicii’s debut album, True, came out on September 13, 2013. By its release date, it was already soaring on the wings of its lead single “Wake Me Up,” the first-ever country/EDM hybrid to cross over to top 40, which as of today has 1.18 billion official on-demand U.S. streams, according to Luminate. The song reached No. 4 on the Billboard Hot 100 in October of 2013, marking what would be the highest-charting song of Avicii’s career, and his only top 10 hit. It also spent 26 weeks at No. 1 on the Hot Dance/Electronic Songs chart, and this past June, became the RIAA’s highest certified dance song.

Dance music purists may have hated the track — when “Wake Me Up” was mentioned at a business lunch in 2013, one dance music publicist put her finger in her mouth and pretended to vomit — but anyone with ears had to admit it was catchy. True was also a phenomenon: With it, Avicii bucked the trend of EDM artists only releasing singles, instead presenting a cohesive body of work that bore surprising country/bluegrass influences, which were at first misunderstood, but ultimately distinguished him as an innovator and world class creative.

The album currently has two billion total on-demand official U.S. streams, according to Luminate. It reached No. 5 on the Billboard 200 in October of 2013 and spent eight weeks at No. 1 on Top Dance/Electronic Albums. Today (Sept. 13) marks the ten-year anniversary of True, which will be celebrated with never-before-released footage of the album’s production, released on the Avicii social media accounts over the next month.

Sundin — now the CEO of Pophouse, which purchased 75% of Avicii’s recording and publishing catalog in 2022 — here recalls the album’s origins to Billboard, along with the excitement for it within Universal, and how an unlicensed Soundcloud mix helped shift hatred for the LP into global acclaim.

Tell me about the earliest phases of the album.

[“Levels”] really moved my career internationally and inside Universal. At that time when I came into [the dance world], everyone did instrumentals beats, and then they tested that on the audience. If the audience liked it, they called in a topliner or vocalist to write the lyrics, and tried different verses and different topliners.

But Tim was like, ‘I want to be an artist. I don’t want to do one song instrumentals and this [testing] process. I want to do an album.” I said “You know, this is dance music. You don’t do albums.”

But he told me that they were already working on it — so I went to Tim’s studio, which was just a five minutes walk from Universal’s Stockholm office — and they played me me “Wake Me Up.” This was in February of 2013.

What did you think when you heard it?

I tried to hold back, because if I say, “It’s fantastic,” then Ash would increase the price for the advance, so I had to hold back everything. I was like, “Yeah, this could work.”

That was the only song they played me. I went back to the office and I called my superiors — because this was above my pay grade, because he asked for a lot of millions for this album — and talked about it. We did so well with “Levels,” and that really was a breakthrough for us, for me and for Universal Music Sweden, because that really ignited interest around the world for EDM music. So when this album was in place, we went all in on it and just did everything we could [for it].

So you first hear “Wake Me Up” in February, and then a month later the album is being debuted at Ultra Music Festival in Miami. Famously, that show bombed. What was it was like being there?

I invited people from all over the world to Ultra Music Festival. There, Avicii decided together with his management to premiere the album — with the original songwriters and topliners he worked with on the album.

So he first played an approximately 45-minutes set of a traditional Avicii concert. Then, for the audience it was like a changeover, like a new act coming on. The DJ booth was moved to the right of the stage, and then came a guy who started singing “Wake Me Up.” For me, it was obvious, because I love the track. But for the audience, it was a disaster. They hated it.

Then Dan Tyminski did “Hey Brother,” and no one understood. They wanted traditional Avicii songs with big drops, and to just able to dance in their party mode, if I say so. So online it was terrible, like, “Rest in peace Avicii’s career.” It was really, really tough for him. He was devastated. He was like, “Am I wrong? Have I done something bad?” He just really didn’t understand the reactions.

What was that moment like for you?

I remember Andrew Kronfeld, who still is the Executive Vice President of Universal Music, was standing there with me and said, “Don’t worry, this is a fantastic album. It was fantastic yesterday, it will be fantastic tomorrow.”

Did the marketing plan for True change at all, after what happened at Ultra?

Yes. What happened was that… we knew the music was great, but we couldn’t release it, because “Wake Me Up” was supposed to be out in mid-June. We couldn’t play anything until that. Then Ash said, “Maybe we can do a remix of it and put it out on SoundCloud.” And I said, “You can’t do that, because that’s not legal.”

Ash said, “But maybe if I do it…” And I was like, “I’m not involved in this, but yes, do it. Just put the mix together.” Avicii remixed all 10 songs from the album and put a mix on SoundCloud. You can still find it there. It’s a fantastic. The reactions in the comments comments — everyone was like, “This is really good.” “Why did people say this was bad? This is fantastic.” I have goosebumps talking about it again, because it was like, “Oh my god, this is really happening.”

That must’ve been exciting.

It created a hype on SoundCloud. Ash could do it, but we [at Universal] couldn’t, because it was licensed to us. [At that time] they didn’t have a deal for for releasing music on SoundCloud that was under contract. So that’s why I was reluctant to do it. If it went wrong … we couldn’t really handle it. But again, I said, “OK, do it.” And they did.

That’s how it took off. That’s how the other conversation changed from being brutally tough and hateful to love for this True album.

Was it always obvious that “Wake Me Up” would be the lead single?

Yes, it was obvious. It wasn’t even a discussion. “Hey Brother” is a little bit too country, so that wasn’t it. “Addicted To You” was one that was discussed. In hindsight, you can always say, “This is what we believed in the whole time.” And, you know, sometimes you lie about it to sound smart. But in this case, it was, “This is the single,” and it was from the beginning.

I was going to ask if this album felt like a business risk within Universal, given the country influences, but it sounds like there was a lot of goodwill around it.

Yeah. Everyone that heard it said, “This is going to be sensational,” because there were so many singles on it. We could work for a long, long time on it… We believed then at Universal Music that EDM was the new big wave. And it was, with Swedish House Mafia and Tiësto and David Guetta and Calvin Harris. It was just, bang.

Was there anything you’d have wanted to change about the album?

One sad thing is that my favorite song on the album was “Heart on My Sleeve” with Imagine Dragons. The interesting thing is that Ash, and I think this is quite clever, didn’t want to have any features on the on the album. Every other EDM artist had “featuring whoever” on the on the songs. Everyone did at this time.

But Ash decided no one could be featured — because if someone like Imagine Dragons gets featured, then it’s going to be “Imagine Dragons featuring Avicii.” If you take all that away, then it’s just an Avicii song, and Avicii is the artist. So when radio station played the song, it’s Avicii.

So that was a negotiation with Imagine Dragons. And [the band] said, “If we don’t get our full credits, you’re not going to get us on the album.” That’s why the song was taken off and why [that track] is an instrumental on the album. It was ready to go. It was recorded.

Then when we did the [posthumous] Tim album, we contacted Imagine Dragons and said, “You will get credit; we really want you to be part of this.”

Was there a feeling of anticipation within Universal around the album of like, “Wait until they hear this”?

Yes. That’s why it was such a crazy feeling when we were at Ultra. I had drink tables paid for. I was spending a lot of money to have everyone from Universal there: marketing directors, managing directors. I played the music the day before the festival, and they loved it.

So it was a shock, because we believed this was going to be so good, and everyone that heard it said it was fantastic … Maybe it was badly presented from stage, so people didn’t understand. It was not communicated that this is what they were going to do … It was a combination of people wanting to party to hit songs they’d heard before and not good presenting from stage. There could have been a voiceover with someone saying, “And now ladies and gentlemen, you’re going to hear the new album from Avicii.” And that wasn’t done. Was I shocked about it? Yes, I was.

So you’re in the VIP section at Ultra with bottle service and all the business people — what’s the mood?

You question yourself. “Am I totally getting this wrong?” “Am I reading in the wrong way?”

I’d always considered that moment for Tim and everybody on stage, but I hadn’t considered your perspective.

No one cares about the record execs. [Laughs.] But it was worse for Tim, of course. He was devastated. He went to his parents, I think it was in Los Angeles, and [his father] Klas told me that he was just shocked.

But it all turns itself around rather quickly, and obviously the album becomes a massive hit. At what point do you start celebrating?

Everywhere in the world, you heard “Wake Me Up” on the radio, but you never celebrate. That’s the crazy thing about being in the music business — you can celebrate when you give an artist a plaque or whatever it is, but then you’re already onto “OK, what’s next?”

Do you think Tim felt that pressure of “what’s next?”

I never talked to him about exactly that. But he was just — he was a very, very good igniter when it came to creating music. When he unfortunately died too early, if you look at sketches, demos and songs on his hard drive, he was close to 100 [projects]. He loved to study, loved to work with other people.

When he when he landed in Oman [editors note: Avicii died by suicide in Muscat, Oman on April 20, 2018], we had a conference call and talked about the music. He was so in a positive mode. “This is what we’re going to do, and please book a studio in [Kenya]; I want to work with people there, and then I want to go to New Hampshire, then l want to go to London.” He just wanted just to have studio time, he loved to be in the studio and do his thing. So yeah, so he was looking forward.

10 years on, what do you think True‘s legacy is?

It’s hard for me to say. Billboard did a thing about the 100 biggest moments of EDM, and the number one was Tim’s career. I just…I get emotional because it’s… [a pause while he tears up, then collects himself], because what we accomplished during this short period of time, it’s just unbelievable.

There were an unlimited number of ways the new Chemical Brothers album might have turned out.
Gathered in the studio, the duo — Ed Simons and Tom Rowlands — presided over a glut of music made during the pandemic. Unsure of what to do with it all, they considered assembling a triple LP, or a quadruple LP, or maybe something more loose and kitchen sink-ish that would highlight the nuances of their creative process.

“I was thinking, ‘Maybe that’ll be cool, to do something really different to how we’ve made our albums before,’” Rowlands tells Billboard over Zoom, “And then in listening to it, it was like, ‘Hm, that’s not so good.’”

So ultimately the pair, friends since their days at the University of Manchester and icons since the release of their groundbreaking 1995 debut Exit Planet Dust — did what they’ve done for the last 30 years and pared it all down to the 11-track collection For That Beautiful Feeling, their 10th studio LP, out Friday (Sept. 8) via Republic Records. With many options for how to Tetris the project together, the guys just let their moods dictate.

“We always want our music to not be a technical exercise, but to reflect how the two of us are feeling,” Simons says. “And I guess, you know, it has been a very strange four years.”

He’s not wrong. Much has gone down on a global scale since the Brothers released their last album, 2019’s No Geography. The world went into lockdown a few weeks after the LP won dance/electronic album of the year at the 2020 Grammys. Amid the pandemic, Rowlands tucked himself away in his Sussex studio and started banging out music, which Simons picked up when it was safe to do so. “It was the longest period we’ve spent apart for a while,” Simons says of that time.

As COVID eventually waned, the war in Ukraine began, living costs spiraled in the U.K. and elsewhere and the climate crisis became increasingly tangible and exponentially scarier. It was, is, a lot of psychic weight for them, and for everyone else. But there were, of course, moments of daily joy. That, altogether, was their mood, and thus that is the album.

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For That Beautiful Feeling catapults from ecstasy to dread (“we have no reason to live!” declares track two, “No Reason”), to sadness, to a sort of hectic waking dream state, to hope, to the transcendent title track that closes the LP. In total, the project reflects the anxieties and exhilarations of life on earth in 2023 through the same sort of tightly wound, acid-soaked, elegant, raucous, rock-ish, blissful and often subversive style that’s defined their discography.

This oeuvre contains many moments of grace and soaring beauty (“Swoon,” “The Sunshine Underground,” etc.), and it’s this same spirit of connection, love and hope that ultimately centers and steers the new project. Just listen to Beck assuring “When you feel like nothing really matters/ When you feel alone/ When you feel like all your life is shattered/ And you can’t go home/ I’ll come skipping like a stone” on the momentous “Skipping Like a Stone” and try not to feel at least a little uplifted.

“It can’t but affect what sort of music you want to put out,” Simons says of the global crises in play while the album was made. “But we didn’t necessarily want to dwell in that place. We feel like what we create is perhaps a way of having moments of release and escape. ‘Rousing’ became kind of a touchstone. Obviously there’s reflective music within the album, and there’s kind of quite sad bits, but generally we wanted the tone to be one of, not necessarily celebration, but — how can we get to the the part of people that wants to come alive and wants to not stay in this disenchanted, stagnant place?”

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“I mean, but it all starts with the desire of uplifting myself,” adds Rowlands. “That’s also what the title of our album is about… For that moment when you hear something, and it affects you and you just kind of get overwhelmed and overtaken. That moment is always the thing being in the studio or playing live is chasing.”

Anyone who’s seen The Chemical Brothers live knows their efficacy in achieving such a feeling in the live setting, with shows bringing audiences to heavy, cathartic, deliriously joyful and yes, ultimately beautiful places.

For U.S. audiences, though, the opportunity to partake has been fewer and farther between than many of us would prefer, with the Brothers playing only roughly a few U.S. shows over the last several years. This includes a primetime slot at Coachella’s Outdoor Stage this past April, a headlining gig at Portola in San Francisco last fall (“It felt really like a real post-EDM festival,” Rowlands says of the event. “We didn’t naturally feel at home in that EDM world”), along with dates in Santa Barbara, New York, Seattle and the Denver area. While they’re touring heavily in the U.K. this fall, they don’t currently have any U.S. shows on the schedule.

“The costs have gone up so much,” Simons says of touring in the States post-pandemic. “It’s just not really viable at the moment… I’m apologetic to the people who do want to see us that it is increasingly difficult for us to get to America, because we have had the times of our lives playing there.”

While the guys and their team have discussed paring down their show to make touring the U.S. more affordable — “a debate that has raged over Zoom,” says Simons — they don’t necessarily want to risk disappointing people who’ve seen social media clips of their current production, which involves a wall of equipment, a strange and captivating visual show and a pair of giant marching robots.

“[The production] originally came from the fact that we didn’t want to inflict [audiences with] just the two of us awkwardly standing with the synthesizers,” says Simons, “so we wanted a big back job, but it’s just grown and grown, and now we’ve got these 40-foot clowns voicing the words.”

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But if U.S. audiences can’t catch the guys live in the near future, access is available through Paused in Cosmic Reflection, a Chemical Brothers biography coming Oct. 26. Written with author and old friend Robin Turner, the book includes interviews with Simons and Rowlands, along with pals including Beck, Wayne Coyne and Noel Gallagher. The book tracks the Brothers since their earliest days, when they carried their own gear to sets and woke up the morning after to finish essays on Chaucer.

“I guess there’s no end date,” Simons says of this retrospective, “but we are nearer to the end of The Chemical Brothers than we are the beginning… It has been good to reflect and remember some history. I guess you’ve got to do it before you start forgetting everything, and I’ve got a really good memory.”

“He remembers, like, every small gig above a barber shop we ever did,” says Rowlands. “Then someone would produce a photograph of it and I’d be like, ‘Oh, gotcha. Maybe we did do that.’ … But one of the things about our band is, we don’t like stopping and reflecting. I always want to move on to the next thing. This book really felt like stopping and reflecting.”

They agree their biggest takeaway from all this contemplation is that, Rowlands says, “Our friendship is at the heart of it. That’s the thing that has enabled us.”

“Without being too trite, there’s a chemistry between us,” adds Simons. “We’ve just grown up together. We know what makes each other tick, what makes each other upset… We like each other, it’s as simple as that.”

In terms of legacy, neither sees an expiration date for what they do. Rowlands, who assures that he’ll always be in the studio making music, is pragmatic: “When no one shows up to your concert or your DJ gig, no one listens to your record, then it’s time.”

Simons says the legacy is simply the body of work they’ve created and continue adding to. Then he thinks about it a bit more and tells me a story about an all-ages gig they recently played in the English countryside.

“After, lots of our friends bought their teenage kids backstage, and they were all wearing Chemical Brothers T-shirts. And then there were little kids, and they had little Chemical Brothers baseball caps.

“Usually,” he continues, “when people come back it’s like ‘Do you want a beer?’ And this time it was like ‘Do you want some chocolate?’ Just seeing 10 or 15 kids who are all children of our friends, and they loved the gig. They lasted till the end. It was cool. That’s the legacy.”

He agrees that it was even, in fact, a beautiful feeling.