Hey Brother

Avicii's most complete argument for the bluegrass-house hybrid he had been chasing since "Wake Me Up." A banjo picks out the figure, a stomping four-on-the-floor arrives underneath it, and the collision that should sound like a novelty instead sounds inevitable — the production keeps the acoustic instruments genuinely acoustic, mic'd with room and body rather than sampled flat, so the drop lands as a barn dance amplified to stadium scale. Dan Tyminski, the bluegrass singer whose voice carried "Man of Constant Sorrow" in *O Brother, Where Art Thou?*, delivers the vocal in a weathered, church-pew baritone that no other 2013 dance record could have gotten near. The lyric is a vow between siblings — I'll be there when you're in trouble, when the sky falls, when there is nothing else — plain to the point of hymn, which is exactly what lets it survive the beat drop. There is no romance in it and no irony, only loyalty, and that made it strange and durable in a genre built on the moment. It works at a wedding, on a long drive with an old friend, and, since Avicii's death, as something closer to a farewell than anyone intended.