On the fifth-floor terrace of a Hollywood hotel, Röyksopp’s Torbjørn Brundtland brandishes a large bottle of Panna water like a magnum of champagne. He fills the plastic cups held out by his musical other half, Svein Berge, and me. We gulp it down. It’s brutally hot during this short break before their DJ gig at the Fonda Theatre, one stop on their tour in support of the duo’s most recent release, True Electric.
In shorts and a white T-shirt, his tan setting off his blue-green eyes, Berge looks ready for tennis. Brundtland, in joggers and shades, his porcelain skin and white beard glowing in the sun, seems like he’d rather be back in his room. All three of us chew gum, feigning casualness, though the grinding of our teeth gives us away. For me, it’s partly nerves: I’ve had more Röyksopp interaction in the past few years than in their entire quarter-century of existence.
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True Electric is Röyksopp’s fifth full-length release since 2022. That year brought Profound Mysteries, a three-part project as dense with visual material as it was with music, followed by the True Electric North America tour in 2023. In 2024, the Profound Mysteries universe expanded with Nebulous Nights (An Ambient Excursion into Profound Mysteries), a live reinterpretation of Profound Mysteries’ material. A few months later came True Electric, an alternate-universe companion piece featuring 19 reworks from the 2023 tour and remixes from their catalog, including standout collaborations like 2014’s “Do It Again” (with Robyn) and “Running to the Sea” (with Susanne Sundfør). This DJ tour draws from all of it.
“It’s almost an egocentric thing,” says Berge—the more vocal of the two—of Röyksopp’s choice to embark on a DJ tour. “It’s an exercise for us. It’s about keeping it fresh. The live with the band expression is more pre-written. [DJing] is a playground. Very intuitive. It’s the closest we can get to improvisation. If we were to do like Keith Richards, playing the riff for ‘Satisfaction’ every night for 60 years, that’s not for us. That’s no dig at him, but we couldn’t do that. We need to change it up.
He adds, “But I’m curious, does Keith Richard feel the same now as he did in the late ’60s playing [sings the ‘Satisfaction’ riff]?”
“I’m just happy we’re able to DJ,” says Bruntland as Berge grunts in agreement at regular intervals. “It’s the most physical manifestation of what we do. It’s the least theoretical, the least introverted. It’s the most displaying of yourself for the world to see. Without some of the nerve of what we’re doing, it would have felt a little bit safer.”
True Electric leans into Röyksopp’s dancefloor roots. There are two versions: a conventional track-by-track, and an almost two-hour continuous mix—the ideal way to experience it. The latter plays like a carefully curated DJ set, and the best way to hear it is through the visualizer, which simulates watching Röyksopp DJ from over their shoulders.
“Desperately trying to recapture youth,” Berge deadpans when asked what Röyksopp’s recent draw to the dancefloor is.
“For me, it’s why not both?” Bruntland says as he holds his hands, palms up, by his ears. “For us it’s never been, ‘Now we’re only going to do club music.’ We love it and we love—as we’ve spoken about—the freedom of being able to improvise sets and not do the same thing over and over. That has something to do with—not necessarily capturing youth, but staying energized in some way, physically and mentally, and artistically.
“At the same time,” he continues. “We are producing and composing and writing music that doesn’t have anything to do with club music.”
“Nebulous Nights, the almost three-hour-long ambient album, is quite the opposite,” Berge points out. “It’s very introspective. It doesn’t really move your hips at all. It’s all about your head and journey inwards. It’s not as physical and bodily, in that sense. [Torbjørn] said, ‘Why not both?’ Why not everything? We enjoy having a certain eclectic quality to Röyksopp. You never know what to expect. For our own part, we don’t necessarily have a clear agenda or a plan. What we do is a product of what we feel like at a given point or time in our collective lives. Sounds a bit pretentious, but it is the truth.”
What’s remarkable is how much creative mileage Röyksopp has gotten from Profound Mysteries. It was their first major output since 2014’s aptly titled The Inevitable End, after which they announced they were done releasing traditional albums. They called Profound Mysteries “an expanded creative universe and prodigious conceptual project”—a phrase that sounded like it came from a thesaurus. But they’ve made it work, building a stream of fresh material and engaging live and DJ sets that avoid rehashing. Instead, the references to earlier songs stitch the projects together.
“We’ve been committing commercial suicide ever since we arrived on the scene,” says Berge. “We do things our way. There’s freedom in that. And it allows us to not be the flavor of the month and continue to have a prolonged career.”
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