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It was an understandably sensitive process for Carl Falk to complete the work on “Let’s Ride Away,” a previously unreleased Avicii track that’s officially out today (May 15) and comes seven years after the Swedish producer’s death at age 28.

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Falk, who was a frequent Avicii collaborator during the artist’s lifetime and who also helped complete some of the music for the 2019 posthumous album Tim, says that when he originally received the music for “Let’s Ride Away,” the experience was like being thrust back in time.

“It’s almost like you open someone’s drawer of clothes who’s not there anymore, and you look at the T-shirt like, ‘Oh, remember this old thing?’” Falk tells Billboard over Zoom from his home studio in Stockholm. “It’s kind of the same opening a song like this, because there were so many elements in it that were like, ‘Oh, the way he colored his piano chords, or the way that pick bass plays. It’s so simple, but so good.’ I was just listening and enjoying it for a second, like ‘I miss this; I miss this style of music; I miss making it, and I miss the blend of of organic and electronic elements.’ It was like a memory coming back.”

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“Let’s Ride Away” is defined by this collision of past and present. The track was originally written in Nashville circa 2017 by Avicii and Kacey Musgraves, along with prolific country songwriter Luke Laird, who’s penned music for a laundry list of greats, including Eric Church and Carrie Underwood.

“New [writing sessions], you just never know how they’re going to go,” Laird says in a video accompanying the song’s release. “I got in there and [Tim] couldn’t have been more welcoming and warm. Honestly it was very similar to a normal Nashville songwriting session. Sat down, started with the guitars, and then he just started doing his thing.”

The artist born Tim Bergling eventually layered up the song with a kickdrum and other electronic elements, Musgraves recorded the vocals and the trio named the track “Ride Away.” The song, however, was never released, although versions of it have leaked onto the internet over the years.

Now called “Let’s Ride Away,” the song is officially out of the vault and part of Avicii Forever, a new compilation that features many of the artist’s biggest hits, like “Levels” and “Wake Me Up,” with “Let’s Ride Away” being the project’s only previously unreleased track. (While a handful of Avicii remixes have been released since his death, “Let’s Ride Away” is the first original song to come out since Tim.)

Falk says Johnny Tennander of Sony Music Publishing Scandinavia reached out to him in October of 2024 to ask if he would complete the track. “[Johnny] said ‘Hey, no one knows this yet, but we’re going to do a best of album, and I think we found a song that could potentially be super good,’” Falk recalls. “‘He said, ‘I’m not going to jinx it or anything, but do you mind coming up to my office, just to to hear it?’”

Falk went to the office, where Tennander played him two versions of “Ride Away”, one at at a BPM familiar to the Avicii wheelhouse and another at a slower tempo. “One thing I instantly felt,” Falk says, “was the typical Tim thing of introducing a new instrument into his palette of sounds. I can tell by hearing the pedal steel that this is Tim for the first time trying out a new instrument, to try to make it an Avicii instrument.”

Given that Musgraves had bowed out of the song, there was also the task of finding a new vocalist. The team eventually landing on Elle King. In early 2025, Falk worked with King over Zoom while she was in the studio with another frequent Avicii collaborator, Albin Nedler. “Tim was really particular with his melodies,” says Falk, “and also when I listen to Kacey’s vocals, she had a specific style of singing — so I really wanted Elle to sing it in her own way, but also be respectful of the melody.”

King was keen to get it right. As Falk recalls, she was like, “‘Okay, whatever you need. One more take. One more take. One more take. I’m gonna try this, and I’m gonna go for this note.’ It was a really easy, fun process and such a relief to to hear like, ‘She gets the song.’ You don’t have to really transform it into something else. You just have to get it recorded, and it will be great.”

On the production front, Falk says he was given “a couple of different demo versions of the song, and they were slightly different. That was easy to hear, because I asked for all the files from anything I could get, to really dig in and listen to what exactly was in there.” He says a couple of elements were hidden low in the mix, with his completion work bringing them more to the fore.

“It was quite obvious what we should do,” he says. “It was more fixing and touching up. The whole idea was already there. For me, that’s the big challenge and big responsibility, to finish something. It was the same with the Tim album, where it’s like a guessing game, because usually you’re two people sitting in the same room.”

To aid the process, Falk opened a computer file in which he keeps roughly four dozen signature production elements Bergling used in his work: kick drums, bass drums, transitional sound effects and more. “I’m not going to use these sounds for anything else ever,” Falk says. “But in this case, they got used one last time.” He also returned to songs like 2015’s “Broken Arrows” and “Sunset Jesus” that he and Bergling worked on together, to recall how they’d made certain sounds. (Falk also has songwriting credits on songs including One Direction‘s “What Makes You Beautiful” and Nicki Minaj‘s “Starships.)”

Of course, finishing the work of your deceased friend and collaborator is both technically and emotionally delicate work. Falk says that compared to doing the work for Tim less than a year after Bergling died on April 20, 2018, he was more emotionally prepared this time, adding that the process “gave me a bit more confidence that this song is too good not to be heard.”

Many fans are celebrating the release of new Avicii music, and there are also critics who argue it would be better to cease new Avicii projects — which over the years have included the release of Tim, the opening of the Avicii museum in Stockholm, a photo book, a biography and a documentary released this past December. (In 2022, Swedish entertainment company Pophouse acquired 75% of the recording and publishing catalog, with the other 25% remaining with the Bergling family.)

But Falk says the opportunity in “Let’s Ride Away” is in how it meaningfully expands the Avicii repertoire. “It doesn’t sound like you’re just releasing something that sounds like 10 other things he’s done,” he says. Falk adds that his teenage children are just now getting into Avicii, and that he believes “Ride Away” and the Avicii Forever project are ways for new fans to potentially discover the late artist, his sound and his substantial catalog.

I suggest that there are few people who could do justice to the song better and more respectfully than someone who knew and worked with Avicii so closely while he was alive.

“I hope that’s the case,” says Falk. “It’s surely the case for for me, and my reason for doing it was exactly that.”