“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.

As well as being lauded with bringing radio-friendly house music to the mainstream masses, Swedish House Mafia are also recognised for transporting that euphoric pulse out of the clubs and into arenas. In 2011, they became the first electronic act to headline and sell out Madison Square Garden in New York. The following year, with another historic show, they transformed the UK’s Milton Keynes Bowl into a packed open-air club. Their breakthrough as artists has been in the spectacle as well as the scale: borrowing the visuals of stadium rock – powerful pyrotechnics, vast banks of LED lights – while also folding hip-hop and rock elements into their house beats.

In their early Stockholm days, it’s documented that Swedish House Mafia would be willing to perform for free drinks. Then came their blinding international success and the intense party culture that, naturally, came with it. Today, it’s a different kind of lifestyle for the trio, two of whom are now explicitly sober: Angello for more than a decade, Ingrosso for the past two years. “It’s trippy to be sober and doing this, to be honest,” the latter says. “It’s even more trippy than when you drink. When you’re drinking, you become part of it. You get numb to your feelings. But when you’re sober…” “You get goosebumps,” Angello adds. “From the vibe, the energy.” Despite claims that the euphoria still hits the same in a sober state, they do admit that they’ll enjoy the civilised 11pm wrap time of their upcoming Ibiza residency sets this summer.

Video: Behind the scenes with Swedish House Mafia for Vogue Scandinavia’s summer issue

Axwell, who is five years older than 43-year-old Ingrosso and Angello, has been quieter up until this point in our conversation, but this is clearly a thread that matters to all of them. “Performing and seeing the crowds react to our music, that’s something that we really appreciate and don’t take for granted anymore,” he says, “At one point, before we broke up, it was all a blur. It was just so big and so often that we didn’t really reflect on what was happening.”

The break-up that Axwell references came amidst the peak of their initial rise, in 2013, complete with a global goodbye tour and the unusually candid documentary Leave The World Behind, which revealed cracks in the brotherly Mafia dynamic. But what had seemed like a conclusion proved instead to be just an intermission. The group surprised fans by reuniting on stage at Ultra Music Festival in 2018, and then releasing their first-ever studio album in 2022.

Despite the hiatus, Swedish House Mafia slipped seamlessly back into their rarefied position in the electronic music landscape. Now, in their forties, working in an EDM world that celebrates youth and newness, do they feel any sense of vulnerability? “We just find it inspiring,” Axwell answers simply. “If there’s a new upcoming force, we want to collaborate with them,” Ingrosso agrees. “As Axwell says, we get very inspired. If there’s a 19-year-old kid with a better brain and ears than we have, we need that.”

Collaboration has been ingrained in the Swedish House Mafia spirit from the beginning. After all, ‘One’, the track that first catapulted them into mainstream consciousness, was a team-up with Pharrell Williams. “The first collab is the one you remember the most,” Axwell says, recalling how he was a devoted fan of both Williams and N.E.R.D., and how the trio tenaciously managed to koka soppa på en spik (make something out of nothing) by chopping and reshaping a near-unusable vocal sample they received from him.

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Fifteen years later, ‘One’ became the basis for a very different kind of collaboration, entirely reframed by the Swedish composer Jacob Mühlrad, who spent eight months creating a symphonic interpretation of the track for performance at the 2025 Nobel Prize Gala. “We talked about it at the time,” Angello says, “like, when else in our lives are we going to experience our music as part of a symphony?”

Curiosity – about other artists, other disciplines and the industry itself – shapes the group’s trajectory. They speak with admiration about their past and present collaborators across very different sonic worlds: including Mühlrad, whom they describe as “a living genius”; The Weeknd, whose presence in the studio, Axwell says, “is like driving a Ferrari”; English songwriter Connie Constance, whose vocal delivery was “a type of magic”; and American multi-instrumentalist Eartheater, who, as Ingrosso puts it, “comes from a different world”.

More recently, Swedish House Mafia have invited collaboration into their visual world as well, working closely with acclaimed Swedish artist Alexander Wessely. One outcome of the collaboration fronts this issue of Vogue Scandinavia: a unique image conceived by Wessely, marking the first time this magazine has featured original artwork on its cover.

Their portraits, taken individually by Wessely, are fused into a single composition. Their faces emerge as if cast in molten copper or pressed into weathered stone. For the trio, the artwork speaks directly to ideas of permanency. “It kind of symbolises legacy, about staying, in a way,” Ingrosso says. The starting point of the concept, he explains, came from Stockholm’s brunnslock water manholes – imprinted iron fixtures across the city streets that have remained unchanged for generations. “They’ve always been there, looking the same for almost a hundred years,” he says. “We started asking ourselves: how can Swedish House Mafia exist like that?”

It’s not the first time the group has drawn on their hometown for inspiration. Wessely also worked with them to claim the city’s tre kronor insignia of three crowns, a motif first seen on a royal coat of arms as far back as the 14th century. “It was an idea coming from Alex and his team as well,” the group explains. “We were looking at Stockholm City Hall, with its three crowns on the tower and wondering, could we put DJs up there?” they laugh. “So it was a symbol of us performing in Stockholm in the beginning,” Ingrosso says, “...but it made sense for us to keep it,” Angello finishes.

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Another major dose of Swedishness is coming to airwaves this summer courtesy of the group. Coinciding with the release of this magazine will be their latest track ‘Happiness Is So Sad’ created with Lykke Li – an artist whose back catalogue suggests she has been working through this particular contradiction for some time (cue ‘Sadness Is A Blessing’, ‘Happy Hurts’, ‘So Happy I Could Die’ or her album So Sad, So Sexy). Completing the Swedish super-team lineup behind the song are hit-making producers Max Martin and Oscar Holter. “We had this idea of putting together a Swedish Avengers crew,” Ingrosso says. The result may well be the song of summer 2026.

Even though a couple of her tracks have been dancefloor mainstays for decades, Lykke claims she has never done “real dance music before”. Working with Ingrosso, Angello and Axwell, then, felt inevitable. “They are the greatest and most iconic – and of course Swedish,” she says, laughing, when I reach her for this story. “I always want to work with Swedes.” The session itself came together quickly. “It’s always nerve-racking working with new people and writing something on the spot,” she continues, “but Sebastian completely put me at ease. His energy is insanely positive and infectious.” The admiration runs both ways. “Lykke is just one of the coolest artists ever – she’s a true artist,” Ingrosso says. “She has this depth that we really love, and her voice is so unique.”

According to both parties, ‘Happiness Is So Sad’ “kind of wrote itself” in a single burst. “When we found the riff we were all screaming with our hands in the air,” Lykke recalls. “We probably all got tinnitus listening back.” What they were chasing, she adds, was that elusive and, her view, inherently Swedish, balance of euphoria and melancholia: “Those melodies that pierce your soul, that make you want to cry and dance at the same time. We Swedes understand darkness but we love the light more than anyone else.”

For a group long associated with nocturnal intensity, Swedish House Mafia are now engaging more with that exact element: light. “We’ve been in a lot of darkness and heavy materials,” Ingrosso says, “and we still love that. But we’re also moving into lighter spaces now which feels organic. It feels more pure.” “We’re finding more light,” Angello nods, “and it’s nice.”

Part of this transition towards the light is taking shape through yet another creative presence in their orbit: the spiritual director Ellen Nielsen, who recently returned to Scandinavia after years working internationally with A-list artists. While Wessely’s contribution gives the trio a visual permanence – stone, metal, symbols – Nielsen’s influence moves in a different, less visible register. “Ellen kind of draws out the essence of people,” they explain. “There are things happening between the music and the crowd and the fans that you can’t really touch. The energy. That’s where she is.”

The turn towards light, the trio point out, isn’t entirely new. Maybe it’s even been hiding in plain sight across their records for years, in songs such as ‘Don’t You Worry Child’ or ‘Heaven Takes You Home’ – tracks with lyrics that, as Ingrosso jokes, make them “sound almost like a Christian band”. He laughs, but then adds, more seriously, that “the world is in a very weird place”, and that what they are chasing now are those rare moments – in festival fields, in stadiums, and even through online connection with fans – when energy takes over. The presence of Nielsen has sharpened that instinct. “Also, her feminine touch is so important, I always say your strongest side as a man is your feminine side,” Ingrosso adds. “And look at us, we’re all dudes here.”

With all this talk of light, it becomes hard not to notice how much of it is streaming through the villa’s windows, illuminating the cables, notebooks and empty coffee cups with afternoon sun. Seeing the trio here, in their natural – and quite frankly, very wholesome – habitat, the mythology starts to make a different kind of sense. They might be a mafia but they are Swedish after all: drawn to nature, conscious of excess, serious about music, protective of integrity. As Angello puts it, simply: “We just love what we do like a gardener loves his flowers.”