Home » Latest » TRENDING NOW » The Chainsmokers, ILLENIUM – Takeaway (Official Video) ft. Lennon Stella

The Chainsmokers, ILLENIUM – Takeaway (Official Video) ft. Lennon Stella

4

24 0 TRENDING NOW

7.8

SaveSavedRemoved 2

The Chainsmokers and ILLENIUM take heartbreak to the top of a Hudson Yards landmark.

The Chainsmokers and ILLENIUM officially dropped “Takeaway” on July 24, 2019, pairing the duo’s pop-leaning production with ILLENIUM’s melodic future-bass sound and vocals from Canadian singer-actress Lennon Stella. The official video, premiered on YouTube via ChainsmokersVEVO, was shot on location at The Vessel, the newly opened spiral-staircase structure at Hudson Yards in Manhattan. It’s a track built around a defensive kind of heartbreak, and the visuals lean into that isolation by putting the performers inside one of New York’s strangest new architectural spaces.

• “Takeaway” released July 24, 2019, featuring Alex Pall and Drew Taggart (The Chainsmokers), Nick Miller (ILLENIUM) and vocalist Lennon Stella.
• The song was first teased live when The Chainsmokers surprised the crowd with it during their headline set at Ultra Music Festival in Miami earlier in 2019.
• It stands as the fifth single tied to both The Chainsmokers’ third album, World War Joy, and ILLENIUM’s upcoming third album, Ascend.

A Preemptive Breakup Set to Future Bass

Lyrically, “Takeaway” is built on a single defensive impulse: get out before things get serious enough to hurt. The hook — “Before I love you… I’m gonna leave you” — frames the entire song around protective detachment rather than a clean split, with the narrator admitting “I still want your heart” even while walking away. That tension between wanting connection and refusing to risk it gives the track its emotional pull, and it’s the kind of hook The Chainsmokers have leaned on across the World War Joy rollout.

Stella’s vocal carries that ambivalence without tipping into melodrama, sitting on top of ILLENIUM’s signature layered synths and the kind of drop that’s become his calling card in melodic dubstep and future bass circles. The pairing of Stella’s voice with two producers known for very different corners of dance music — The Chainsmokers’ radio-ready pop-EDM and ILLENIUM’s heavier, more atmospheric production — is part of what made the collaboration notable before the video even existed.

Filming Inside The Vessel

The video’s setting isn’t incidental. The Vessel, designed by Thomas Heatherwick, is the honeycomb-shaped, 16-story climbable sculpture that had just opened as the centerpiece of Related Companies’ Hudson Yards development. Throughout the clip, Taggart, Stella, Pall and Miller are shown walking and performing across its interlocking staircases and geometric platforms, using the structure’s disorienting, repetitive architecture as a visual stand-in for the song’s back-and-forth emotional pull.

The Chainsmokers spoke directly to why the location mattered to them as New Yorkers getting to shoot inside a brand-new city landmark.

“We are from New York so to be a part of something that will be a huge part of New York City history is incredibly special.”

Part of Two Album Rollouts at Once

“Takeaway” isn’t a standalone one-off — it’s doing double duty as the fifth single from The Chainsmokers’ World War Joy and from ILLENIUM’s forthcoming Ascend, meaning the song had to satisfy two separate fan bases and two separate album arcs simultaneously. That the collaboration was previewed live months earlier at Ultra Music Festival in Miami before any studio version existed shows how much both camps were leaning on the record to build anticipation ahead of its formal release.

The Featured Vocalist

Lennon Stella, the Canadian pop singer and actress lending her voice to the hook, gives “Takeaway” its emotional center. Her delivery threads the needle between vulnerability and resolve that the lyrics demand, and pairing a vocalist known outside straight EDM circles with two dance-music heavyweights is consistent with how The Chainsmokers have built out featured spots across World War Joy.

With the video now live and the song slotted into two different album campaigns, the next marker to watch is how “Takeaway” performs on the charts against the rest of the World War Joy rollout — and whether ILLENIUM folds the same Vessel-shot visuals into how he presents Ascend when that album follows.