The Lowest Buddhist Hell

Tim Bergling was 28 when they found him in Muscat, Oman on a Friday afternoon in April. No cause of death was given immediately. He had already stepped away from touring by then—health problems, the grinding physical cost of years on the stadium circuit before he’d hit thirty. The DJ who performed as Avicii had been telling people for a while that he was done with live shows. He got that part right, at least.

"Levels" arrived in 2011 and did what certain tracks do when they’re built exactly right: it colonized every set, every car, every festival for the better part of a year, and somehow it never became annoying. The Etta James sample riding over that piano riff, euphoric in a way that almost felt embarrassing to admit. "Wake Me Up" came a couple of years later and was everywhere, which should have been too much, but wasn’t. "Lonely Together," "Hey Brother," the collaborations that kept finding their way onto radios in places he’d never been. He was good at writing songs that felt like they’d always existed.

The name Avicii is borrowed from Avīci, the lowest level of Buddhist hell—reserved for the worst of the worst. Whether that was a joke or a provocation or just something that sounded right to a teenager in Stockholm making edits on a laptop, I don’t know. That teenager’s actual first step was a remix of the title music from Lazy Jones, a Commodore 64 game from 1984. From there: a competition win in 2008, label offers, then a decade of total ubiquity. Then Oman. Then nothing.

He was influenced by the progressive house generation—Daft Punk, Eric Prydz, Axwell—and that lineage is audible if you listen for it, that tension between pop and trance that he stretched into something genuinely his own. Twenty-eight is before most people figure out what they’re doing. The music doesn’t know that, though. It just keeps playing.