Six years ago this month, Eric Prydz debuted his technological masterpiece of a show, Holosphere, at Tomorrowland 2019. The Swedish producer and his team spent two years conceptualizing and building the structure, visuals and music for Holosphere, which Prydz then performed exactly one time. This had not been the plan.

The internet was instantly aflame with videos of Holosphere spinning, glowing and pulsing (or at least appearing to) during the Belgian dance festival’s first weekend. But between weekends one and two, the roof of the stage where Prydz was performing collapsed, destroying the Holosphere rig.

“We were all a bit like, ‘What the hell just happened?’” Prydz tells Billboard over Zoom. “Everyone had worked so hard. It was a big let down. We didn’t really know what to do from that point. Are we going to rebuild? Are we going to wait? Is insurance going to cover this? It was a big question that lasted for years, really.”

The final answer has come in the form of Holosphere 2.0, the Prydz show that debuted last month at [UNVRS] Ibiza, the island’s newest mega-club. While he and his team initially considered rebuilding the original show, Prydz says they ultimately decided “it would be better for us to look ahead and make a new version of the Holosphere instead of duplicating the first one. That’s basically what we’ve been doing for the past five years.”

If you’re a dance music fan who’s even just casually online, you’ve likely seen many hyped social posts about Holosphere 2.0, which finds Prydz playing from inside a 26-foot tall metal ball. Using new LED technology, this structure flashes with imagery that makes it look like a glowing orb, or an eyeball, or any of the show’s many other space-influenced visuals. It also emits actual holograms.

The [UNVRS] residency runs every Monday through September 1. But those who can’t jet to the white isle will still get a chance to see Holosphere 2.0 when Prydz takes it on tour. While the details are still being worked out, he says the Ibiza run “has been a stepping stone for us, and we’re very excited to find other places where we can do the show.” And when Holosphere 2.0 goes on tour, it will be even bigger.

The primary reason Prydz and his team — a group that includes longtime manager Michael Sershall and longtime creative director Liam Tomaszewski — decided to make an entirely new show is because of how much technology has advanced during the last six years. “It got to a point where it felt that going back and building something we started in 2017 didn’t really feel like us or what we want to do, which is try to push forward” Prydz says.

A major difference between the 2019 and 2025 Holospheres is how they use LED lights. While the original used low resolution LED ribbon, the best material available at the time, 2.0 uses curved, double-sided and transparent LED panels that have never been used anywhere else. “There’s nothing off the shelf,” Sershall of this equipment and designs, all of which the team has trademarked. “It’s all been manufactured for this show.

These panels more than double the imagery resolution, allowing for brighter, more detailed and color accurate visuals. While Tomaszewski calls the differing distances between pixels on the screen “a real headache” to figure out, it resulted in a surface with no breaks in the imagery that fans can look it it from any angle and any area in the club and still see the same view, a feat Tomaszewski says that “we worked really hard to make possible.”

Incredibly, the team also accomplished the “very difficult” task of making the whole structure and lighting system transparent, so audiences can still see Prydz inside it.

The sphere also contains an inner LED panel that Prydz plays in front of, a new feature he says “opens up crazy possibilities for us to do things we couldn’t even think about during the first version of the show.”

For 2.0, the team also partnered with Belgium’s PRG Projects on design and execution. They worked especially closely with PRG’s VP of global scene Frederic Opsomer, whose portfolio includes the rigging cube system for U2’s famous 1992-93 Zoo TV Tour, the stadium pixel displays at the 2012 London Olympics and stage structures for Daft Punk, Coldplay and more, all of which were on the bleeding edge of tech at the time of their debut.

While the team declines to say exactly how much Holosphere 2.0 cost, Sershall says, “It’s expensive, but it’s affordable, and something we want to invest in. We’re not really going to make money on it, but it’s a passion project and something Eric wants to do.”

Landing the show at [UNVRS] was largely a function of relationships. Over the years Prydz has had myriad residencies at Hï Ibiza, another giant island club owned by [UNVRS] founder Yann Pissenem and his company The Night League. The two teams are in conversation year round, so it was natural to bring 2.0 to the new club. Pissenem’s brother Roman, whose company High Scream specializes in event production, also happened to be in the audience for the one and only showing of the first Holosphere.

“He said it was the best-looking show he’s ever seen,” says Sershall. “He got wind of us discussing building Holosphere again, so the team was straight in like, ‘Guys, can we make this work?’ We had to look at the structure and the size of their venue and fit accordingly.”

There was also a more functional reason for doing the show at [UNVRS] versus another island club: “The only reason we can do this show there is because of the weight capacity in the roof,” says Sershall. “The problem with a lot of Ibiza venues is they’re very old and decrepit and can’t take any weight in the roof. [UNVRS] can do the shows of the caliber they’re doing because of the roof’s weight loading and the fact it’s so modern.”

The sphere weighs roughly 16,000 pounds and, at just over 26 feet tall, is so big that it almost didn’t fit into the club. This was due to a miscalculation that didn’t consider the size of the sandbags used as a safety mechanism to keep the structure in place. Discovered a week before opening night, this error made it so the team was literally shaving down the structure by the micrometer to get it onstage.

“In the end it just fit,” says Tomaszewski, who posits “you could probably put a deck of cards” between the structure and the floor.

“Nothing ever goes according to plan and everyone is millimeters from a panic attack every day,” Prydz says of the issues that inevitably happen in the lead-up to a show of this magnitude. “There’s so many elements, and so many new elements that can go wrong.”

And yet everything went exactly to plan on opening night, June 2, when Prydz stepped into the structure and the team closed the door behind him.

“The first sphere we did was open in the back,” he says. “This one isn’t, so they lock me in. It’s quite claustrophobic.”

From inside, Prydz can see the people in the first few rows but says taking in the audience isn’t the point, because “it’s a production show… We want to move me in the background and have the visuals be number one, that and the music.”

The setlist weaves together Prydz’s progressive house arsenal of hits made under his own name and as his Pryda alias, and thus far has closed every time with his 2016 masterpiece “Opus.” One song that has not yet slipped into the show is his 2004 classic “Call on Me,” which has been historically left out of his sets until this past March, when Prydz played it for the first time in 20 years at a show in Austin, Texas.

“I was just flicking through my SD card looking for music and I saw a special edit of the track I have,” Prydz recalls of the moment. “I turned around to my tour manager like, ‘Stefan, should I play ‘Call on Me’?’ It was almost like a joke. He looked at me, like, ‘Yeah, go for it.’ I was like ‘Are you sure?’ I was like, ‘Well, it’s in the same key as the track I’m playing now,’ so I just played it. There was no planning. I was as shocked as everyone else.”

He adds that playing the song felt “weird” given that he hadn’t played it for two decades, “but it was time… I’ll wait another 20 years and I’ll play it again.” [Editor’s note: Not long after the interview for this story, Prydz played “Call on Me” for the second time in 20 years at a July 19 set in Brighton Beach, UK.]

Back at [UNVRS], as the first Holosphere 2.0 performance ended, “I think everyone just felt an enormous amount of relief and pride,” says Tomaszewski. It was like ‘Okay, we can sleep tonight.’”

Naturally, being the flashiest show at the flashiest new club in Ibiza does foster a certain amount of content creation in the audience, with most photos and videos of Holosphere 2.0 also showing thousands of phones thrust in the air as attendees record it.

As artists navigate this phenomenon and the effect it can have on the liveliness of crowds (other Ibiza clubs are doing some phone free shows, events that are getting rave reviews from the DJs themselves), Tomaszewski emphasizes that the visually forward Holosphere 2.0 is “not something we’ve done to try and get views over social media. We just think it’s cool. We were doing it before social media even was a thing.”

“I don’t see these shows as a progression from a DJ set in a club,” adds Prydz. “They are a separate thing. It’s obviously exciting to see how far you can push things, but to have a dark club with a DJ and one flashing strobe light — we never tried to take that and make it into something else. We wanted to make something new, adding almost a fifth element to what I was doing with my music.”

Holosphere 2.0 in fact joins a lineage of high-production Prydz shows that go back more than a decade and include his EPIC (an acronym for “Eric Prydz In Concert”) productions and a show called HOLO that featured stunning visuals and holograms on a flat LED panel. Prydz toured these shows, as he will with Holosphere 2.0. Prototypes for the touring rig are currently being created in China, as the touring edition will feature an even bigger 10 meter structure. This will take the rig from just over 26 feet to nearly 33 feet, the height of a three-story building .

While the team isn’t ready to share details about cities are dates, Sershall says that they’ve played arenas before with EPIC shows, “so there’s no reason why we can’t do arenas with the Holosphere.”

For now though, he adds, “We’ve got an arena-level show going into a nightclub every week.”