“It’s even more trippy to be sober”: Swedish House Mafia on sobriety, legacy and light

The Stockholm stronghold for Swedish House Mafia could reasonably be imagined as concrete, windowless and somewhere deep underground. Instead, our car pulls up on a gravel path by a lake, outside a pastoral 19th century wooden home of fairytale proportions, painted bright yellow and edged with quaint white snickarglädje trim. I check the address again. Are we in the right place?

It’s not the headquarters you’d expect for a group bordering on top tier in the pantheon of electronic music. Even if you couldn’t individually name the members – Axwell, Sebastian Ingrosso and Steve Angello – you’d likely be familiar with the image: three tattooed men in black looming over an altar of DJ decks, summoning stadium-scale crowds.

Inside the villa, however, a bustling businesslike ecosystem emphasises the house-music syndicate in operation. People from the Swedish House Mafia team, which boasts a head count of around 15 in Stockholm alone, confer around long tables and whiteboards that are methodically covered with moodboards and sketches. White A4 papers are printed with single, cryptic capitalised words: faith, life, symphonies, silence. Modular pieces of sound equipment appear in unlikely places, with a familiar likeness to the Teenage Engineering synth immortalised in the track ‘One’.

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We tour their upstairs studio: a sanctuary carved and detailed in wood, overlooking the water and trees. Every space throughout the house is orderly, immaculately clean and filled with light. But the trio see it a little differently. “We call this place dårhuset,” says Ingrosso. “It’s like a psych institute, a nuthouse, literally.” Angello chimes in: “It’s where we are more than home.”

Outside, a grill is perched on a deck. A robotic lawnmower zigzags across the grass. Their teenagers’ bikes rest casually beside parked supercars. It’s a domestic scene that feels closer to a Scandinavian family summer house than any kind of asylum. But there are some clues: Ingrosso mentions he spent his birthday here the previous evening, though instead of celebrating, he had to cancel dinner with his wife and kids to finish a track. He and his co-producers didn’t leave until two in the morning.

Eventually, I get the feeling that this is neither entirely a home nor a workplace, but more a world of its own – somewhere slightly apart from the rest of life. “We’re on our own planet,” Angello confirms. “We’re in a bubble. We’re in this nuthouse, locked in the institute, and people come to visit us.”

Getting started in the early 2000s DJing in a Stockholm pizza joint and a tiny, now-shuttered gay club, Swedish House Mafia have been on a wild journey ever since – to a consistent, driving pulse of 128 beats per minute. It’s the common tempo behind many of their chart-topping crowd-pleasers – and of house music more broadly – that’s seemingly calibrated for euphoria. Synchronising with the rhythm of a quickened human heartbeat, and paired with long build-ups and dopamine-filled drops, it just feels good. In fact, a 2025 study by University of London scientists suggests that regularly listening to house music’s specific beat-per-minute cadence can improve brain health, reduce cortisol and even, allegedly, add years to your life.