Avicii’s sudden death came as a surprise to most of the world.

His family released a statement, saying that he ended his life with a self-inflicted wound using a shard of glass back in May.

Now a new documentary, Avicii: True Stories, promises to provide some insight into the troubled musician’s life before his suicide, shedding light on the circumstances that led to his death.

Levan Tsikurishvili, who spent four years filming the DJ for the documentary, says that he still doesn’t have an explanation for why Avicii did what he did.

Although, the documentary does offer a startling number of clues.

Here’s The Guardian:

Avicii: True Stories, which will debut on Netflix in the US, UK and Australia on 28 December, presents an unflinching portrait of an artist coming apart. With fly-on-the-wall proximity, the camera shows Avicii repeatedly, and emphatically, telling everyone around him how exhausted, anxious and sick he is. “There was never an end to the shows, even when I hit a wall,” the DJ says early in the film. “My life is all about stress.”

You can see an instance of this in the official trailer:

While his friends and family were clearly concerned about him, others pushed him too hard.

“He’s a shell of what he used to be,” says a friend in the film, while another describes him as “a ticking timebomb”.

It all builds to the point where, late in the documentary, Avicii flatly says of touring: “It will kill me.”

The initial cut of the film ends with Avicii making the decision to stop touring and focus on a less stressful life. Six months after its first run in October 2017, Avicii was dead.

The documentary’s new, wide release will inevitably invite a forensic scrutiny. Even the director says he now sees the film “in a very different way. Watching it, I felt everything you can think of. It was a very emotional experience.”

The DJ brought a wider musicality and a broader sense of innovation to EDM than any other artist of the time. He also struggled with his health and alcohol, which he used to take the edge off.

His doctors compounded the problem by enabling a dependence on drugs. They wrote scores of prescriptions for opioids such as Percocet and gabapentin. In the film, Avicii responds by shrugging: “I guess they know what they’re doing.”

The uncensored doccie provides some keen insight into how the DJ felt in the last four years of his life.

Definitely worth a watch.

[source:guardian]