T-Pain debuts unreleased Oliver Tree song at Electric Forest tribute

T-Pain used a back-to-back set with DJ Diesel at Electric Forest in Rothbury, Michigan, to unveil an unreleased collaboration with Oliver Tree while a tribute montage played across the festival’s massive stage screens. The performance landed during the June 25-28 event at Double JJ Resort, which was sold out, giving the debut a rare live audience at a packed summer festival.

The song had been recorded in the studio before Oliver Tree’s June 14 death in a helicopter crash over Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Tree was 32. Two helicopters collided over the city, killing all six people aboard, and Tree was among the victims. He had built a reputation as an eccentric alt-pop figure with viral stunts and songs including “Life Goes On” and “Miss You.”

The unreleased track carried extra weight because it had never been released publicly before T-Pain played it in front of the Electric Forest crowd. That made the moment both a first hearing and a memorial, with the performance framed by the image work on the main screens and by the fact that Tree’s death had come less than two weeks earlier.

Electric Forest’s official lineup listed the pairing as DJ Diesel b2b Teddy Pain. DJ Diesel is Shaquille O’Neal’s DJ alias, and the billing placed T-Pain alongside one of the most recognizable crossover acts in dance music and festival culture. In that setting, a posthumous debut became more than a surprise set change. It became a live example of how unreleased recordings, once held back in the studio, can be transformed into tribute material the moment they are played in public.

Tree’s social media later carried an official statement thanking supporters for their tributes and saying his legacy would live on forever. That message echoed the role the Electric Forest debut played in real time: an emotional public airing of a finished recording, delivered after Tree’s death and before any wider release, at a festival that had already sold out its 2026 run.