For the past six months, music producer Carl Falk has been venturing into his dark and cloistered recording studio in central Stockholm to collaborate with a ghost. “I was trying to produce through someone else’s eyes and ears — someone who’s not here,” he said with vexed intensity, while sitting at his control board. “It was really hard not to criticise yourself the whole time. Would he like this? What would he have done?”
The “he” Falk referred to — Tim Bergling, aka Avicii, the genre-redefining dance-pop songwriter and producer of global hits like “Levels” and “Wake Me Up” — died last April 20 at age 28 during a vacation in Muscat, Oman. A statement from his family at the time stated, “He could not go on,” and while they still decline to go into the details of his death, they are publicly acknowledging the death was a suicide.
The family, still very much grieving, is also breaking its nearly yearlong silence with two announcements: the arrival of newly completed Avicii music and the formation of a charitable organisation called the Tim Bergling Foundation that will support groups involved with mental health and suicide prevention. A full album, titled simply “Tim,” is due out in June, and its first track, “SOS,” arrives Wednesday.
“Tim,” which counts Falk among its core production and writing team, is not a posthumous collection of musical leftovers. Instead, it concentrates on songs the artist was far into writing and producing during the last three months of his life, songs which, his friends say, he very much wanted released. Together, the sounds and sentiments they offer represent a cohesive and striking leap ahead for a musician already known as one of the most impactful innovators in electronic pop of the last decade.
“This was a different Tim,” Falk said. “A Tim that wanted to say something.”
To illuminate the origins of Avicii’s final songs, and to speak more candidly about his suicide, his father sat for his first formal interview since his son’s death. Avicii’s oldest friends spoke, too, as did his most trusted song-writing and production partners in the studios where they have just completed work on the project. All 12 who spoke were in agreement about one thing above all: Not only did they not see Avicii’s death coming, they insisted that in the months before it happened, he was in the best spirits they had seen him in for well over a year.
“He had so many plans,” said Lucas Von Bahder, a close friend since middle school. “There were things he wanted to do, places he was going to go.”
Albin Nedler, a collaborator who was staying in Avicii’s Los Angeles home when he left on his trip, recalled his saying he was “in a really good place.” Another creative partner, Vincent Pontare, communicated with Avicii when he was on the plane to Oman. “He was super excited,” he said. “We talked about doing the album after this.”
Their testimony stands in dramatic contrast to the image of the star presented by the documentary “Avicii: True Stories,” which debuted on Netflix in Sweden directly after his death and in the United States in December. The film, which friends say had the musician’s enthusiastic approval, portrayed an artist who seemed to be having a slow-motion nervous breakdown brought on by the relentless pressures of success and a brutal touring schedule. “My life is all about stress,” he says at one point in the film. “It will kill me.”
The movie also chronicled Avicii’s struggles with alcohol, which led to an 11-day hospital stay in New York in 2012 for pancreatitis; in 2014, his gallbladder and appendix were removed. Afterward, doctors gave him pills for his pain, which he later said were grossly overprescribed. With an unflinching honesty that his friends considered one of his finest traits, Avicii spoke in the film about his social anxiety, lifelong shyness and profound discomfort with fame. “He worked way too much and looked too thin,” Pontare said about that period. “I said to myself, ‘What happened w
