Otto Knows & Avicii Announce Forthcoming Collaboration

While Avicii might have retired from touring, that doesn’t mean that he’s done with producing music. In fact, with Avicii’s free time, expect to see quite a bit of new music from the Sweden-born music producer. Back in April, Avicii told the Hollywood Reporter “To me it was something I had to do for my health. The scene was not for me. It was not the shows and not the music. It was always the other stuff surrounding it that never came naturally to me.”

Yesterday, the Swedish DJ & producer Otto Knows took to Facebook to announce that the two Swedish melodic music producers are combining forces to release their own song “Back Where I Belong.”

While some people don’t quite the history between Avicci and Otto Knows, both of these Swedish artists actually have quite history. As you can see in the picture below, both producers knew each other in their childhoods and grew up together.

Otto Knows unfortunately didn’t include a preview to the track, but some believe this rip from a festival may be the song between Avicii and Otto Knows. Make sure to stay tuned for “Back Where I Belong” when it’s released this Friday.

True to the tease, “Back Where I Belong” arrived later that year, giving fans the first real taste of what an Otto Knows and Avicii team-up sounded like. It leaned into the same melodic, festival-ready sound both producers built their careers on, and it made total sense once you knew the backstory — two childhood friends from Sweden who grew up around the same music scene finally putting a record out together.

Even with Avicii stepping back from the touring grind, collaborations like this one showed he was still very much in the studio, still writing, and still finding ways to put new music out into the world on his own terms. For a producer who had been open about needing to change his relationship with the industry, that mattered a lot to fans who wanted to know he was doing what felt right for him.

It’s also a nice example of how deep some of these artist friendships run. Otto Knows and Avicii weren’t just labelmates or tourmates — they had history together long before either of them became a household name in dance music, and you can hear that familiarity in how naturally the collaboration came together.