Ultra Music Festival, Miami, March 2013. Two Swedish acts, one weekend, two completely different kinds of courage. Swedish House Mafia, the trio of Axwell, Steve Angello, and Sebastian Ingrosso, were closing out a farewell tour that had already become legend. Avicii, born Tim Bergling, was about to debut music that the crowd in front of him absolutely did not want to hear. Both moves said the same thing: the EDM peak of 2012 and 2013 was a moment when the biggest artists in dance music were willing to bet everything on a single decision, and the dancefloor was the place where those bets got called.
Swedish House Mafia had announced their breakup on June 24, 2012, and the news hit the dance world like a dropped bassline. Their farewell tour, named "One Last Tour," kicked off in Dubai on November 16, 2012, and ran 53 dates across Russia, India, South Africa, and North America before landing in Miami. Along the way, the trio played three nights at Stockholm's Friends Arena, performing to over 100,000 people across those November dates. Those shows were their first-ever performances on Swedish soil, which tells you something about the strange geography of superstar DJ culture: you can be the biggest act in the world and never headline your own country until the goodbye tour.
The soundtrack to all of it was "Until Now," their second compilation album, released October 22, 2012, exactly two years after their debut compilation "Until One." It peaked at number 14 on the Billboard 200 and went platinum in Sweden. The album's four singles, "Save the World," "Antidote," "Greyhound," and "Don't You Worry Child," each landed differently, but "Don't You Worry Child," featuring Swedish singer John Martin, was the one that broke through every ceiling. It debuted at number one in the UK with first-week sales of 135,000 copies, topped the charts in Australia and Sweden, and earned a Grammy nomination for Best Dance Recording. The song had been premiered live at their Milton Keynes Bowl show on July 14, 2012, to a crowd of 60,000, and the footage from that night became the official music video.
When SHM closed Ultra on March 24, 2013, John Martin joined them on stage one last time. The set ended with the phrase "We Came, We Raved, We Loved" appearing on screen, the mantra that had followed the whole tour. Billboard called it "a powerful ending" for the trio. The crowd singalong on "Don't You Worry Child" was the kind of release that only happens when a room knows it is watching something finish. The energy in that moment was not grief exactly. It was the feeling of a drop that has been building for two years finally hitting the floor.
Two nights earlier, on March 22, the same festival had a very different atmosphere. Avicii walked out onto the Ultra main stage and, instead of the maximalist progressive house the crowd expected, brought out a live band. Drums, banjo, fiddle, guitar, and three singers. Aloe Blacc stepped up to the microphone and sang a bluegrass-inflected track that had almost nothing in common with the air cannons and pyro happening on every other stage that weekend. The crowd booed. "When we performed at Ultra, it was just awkward," Blacc told Spin in 2019. The same frosty reception greeted a second new track, "Hey Brother," featuring Dan Tyminski of Union Station on vocals, which leaned even harder into country territory.
The song that got booed was "Wake Me Up." It was released as a single on June 17, 2013, after its radio premiere on Pete Tong's BBC Radio 1 show on June 14. By October 2013 it had reached number four on the Billboard Hot 100, Avicii's only top-ten entry on that chart. It spent 26 weeks at number one on Hot Dance/Electronic Songs. The full album, "True," arrived September 13, 2013, on PRMD Music and Island Records, six months after the Ultra set that had seemed to go so badly. It debuted at number two on the UK Albums Chart and cracked the top ten in at least ten countries.
"True" was built around a simple and genuinely risky idea: that the biggest DJ in EDM could make a record that sounded like it belonged in a Nashville studio as much as a festival field. Avicii had been chasing collaborators like Paul Simon and Stevie Wonder, and while those conversations went nowhere, what he ended up with was a cast that included Aloe Blacc, Audra Mae, Adam Lambert, Nile Rodgers, and Linnea Henriksson. The opening track, "Wake Me Up," sets the template immediately: Blacc's voice over a banjo figure, the drop arriving like a translation between two genres that had never shared a room. The crowd at Ultra in March had heard that translation and rejected it. By September, the same translation was number one in ten countries.
Both stories from that Ultra weekend are about the same pressure: what happens when an artist at the absolute top of a genre decides the genre is not enough. Swedish House Mafia answered by walking away clean, on their own terms, with a farewell tour that sold out arenas on multiple continents and ended with a singalong in Miami. Avicii answered by standing on a main stage with a banjo player while people booed, and then releasing the record anyway. Tim Bergling died on April 20, 2018. "Wake Me Up" has since been streamed more than 2.97 billion times globally. The Ultra crowd that booed it was wrong, and the dancefloor, given enough time, always corrects itself.
