Alesso: Inside the Manic World of a Swedish House Sensation
When the streams of fire burst up from the front of Perry’s Stage at Lollapalooza, the heat feels close enough to touch, even standing 15 feet away. It burns clean with no lingering smell; and is momentarily blinding, obscuring the tens of thousands in the audience on the other side. When standing just down the steps from Swedish DJ sensation Alesso‘s onstage platform, the smoke machines are louder than the music, billowing clouds forming with a hiss of intensity like a hydrant on full blast.
To stand on stage while Alesso goes to work behind four CDJs is to see just a part of a careful balancing act. The coordination between lighting, pyrotechnics, music, lights and visuals (the cycling images illuminating the wraparound screen that hugs the platform) takes place primarily over headsets, an invisible guiding hand which transforms 24-year-old Alessandro Lindblad — a slim, delicate Nineties baby — into Alesso, a DJ superstar who stands astride the world, his long hair slicked back, producing massive, moody anthems of emotional transcendence for an audience of millions.
Or so he hopes. Breaking in America, even in the wake of the EDM boom, remains a tricky maneuver for Europe’s biggest DJs. Like Sebastian Ingrosso, his mentor and member of the now-defunct Swedish House Mafia, Alesso’s profile is bigger overseas; and while he has a Las Vegas residency and no trouble packing festival stages in the States, true pop stardom currently eludes him. He’s collaborated with some of popular music’s biggest names — artists like One Republic, Ryan Tedder and Tove Lo. “Heroes (We Could Be),” his collaboration with the latter, has become his first song to reach the American Top 40.
Alesso was born in 1991 to a blonde, blue-eyed Swede and an Italian mother, neither of whom made music professionally, although his father did some DJing and dancing for fun. But as a child, Lindblad was always into music. “I used to dance, sing, you name it,” he says of his childhood in Stockholm. “Played the piano, everything.” When he was 14 or 15, he became enamored with house music through DJs like Erick Morillo, Roger Sanchez and Eric Prydz. “When I was drawn into this whole world around it,” he says, “it became like a drug to me.”
Even as a kid, Alesso felt apart from what he deems as his country’s laid-back national character. “It’s a positive thing . . . to be a typical Swede, to be very chill and be like, ‘I have my thing . . . I don’t want to work my ass off too much.’ Some people are like that and that’s great,” he says. “I’m not that guy. I’m the guy who wants to work my ass off.”
A few hours before he was scheduled to perform that night in Grant Park, Alesso and a portion of his small team navigated a white van through the congested streets of Lollapalooza weekend in downtown Chicago. He’d just arrived in the city that day: He was in the middle of a European tour and had made the trip across the world specifically for the fest. Everyone is, accidentally or intentionally, clad in black. “Team stage black” someone jokes. Alesso is slender, with skinny bird legs inside grey jeans and fashionable white hi-tops with a snakeskin texture. He wears a medium-sized silver watch; a ring; a bracelet. He has sharp facial features, and cleanly groomed scruff. His small-talk is nutritional in nature — Alesso is a recent convert to Bulletproof coffee, a recipe that incorporates butter and coconut oil, rather than the usual creamer.