The Aussie electronic producers and DJs who rule the world’s pop charts and playlists
From Grammy nominees Rufus Du Sol to Cold Heart remix kings PNAU, Australian electronic artists are leading the charge back to the dancefloor.
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Over two golden weeks in November, alt-dance trio Rufus Du Sol played three triumphant stadium shows in Los Angeles, picked up a 2022 Grammy nomination in the Best Dance/Electronic Recording category and won the 2021 ARIA awards for Best Group and Best Dance Release.
Another Australian globally renowned trio PNAU commanded the pop charts and playlists for five months with their remix smash Cold Heart, featuring the power pop duo of Elton John and Dua Lipa.
If that wasn’t enough to confirm the rise and rise of Australia’s electronic producers and DJs, the viral arrival of Shouse’s unifying choir on Love Tonight – originally released four years ago – continued its reign as the song to soundtrack the world’s return to the dancefloor.
“We played the Opera Garnier in Paris and the names on the wall are Beethoven, Mozart … and then you’ve got Shouse (short for Shit house) from Melbourne,” Shouse’s Jack Madin said as he and Ed Service explored the Eiffel Tower on their European tour.
When the world stopped dancing last year, Australia’s electronic music stars dropped the pop anthems to keep club and festival-starved fans on their feet.
A scan of the Shazam charts, which show in real time the songs piquing the interest of listeners – throw up at least a dozen Australian tracks including the Jolyon Petch and Reigan Derry’s take on Fleetwood Mac’s Dreams, the Rufus singles On My Knees and Next To Me, Dom Dolla and Mansionair’s collaboration Strangers, Flight Facilities’ song Heavy, Mash’d and Kutcher’s remix of Powderfinger’s On My Mind, the new Hayden James release Waiting For Nothing, new producer Luude’s dance take on Down Under and Alison Wonderland’s latest F … U Love U.
Even Walking On A Dream, the 2008 smash from Empire of the Sun – a side project by Luke Steele and Nick Littlemore – is enjoying a resurgence as fans reconnect with dance music as clubs reopen and festivals return.
While stadiums and festival main stages were once dominated by the top tier pop and rock acts, artists including Flume and Rufus Du Sol and DJs Alison Wonderland and Fisher are now the headliners.
Rufus, who formed in Sydney in 2010 and have been based in Los Angeles for the past four years, kicked off their return to live performance ahead of new album Surrender at the iconic Red Rocks Amphitheatre in Colorado in August, a concert watched by their tens of thousands of locked-down Australian fans online with tears in their eyes.
“I feel we’ve made some pretty lofty goals and we keep surpassing them,” the group’s Jon George said.
“Playing Coachella was one of the first and then touring the world, playing late night TV in America and I feel like the last goal we probably wrote down was playing stadium shows.
“We always knew our music would work in clubs but taking it to those stadiums was what we were striving for.”
Littlemore, who has straddled the pop and dance worlds for two decades, said electronic music “is really just modern music at this point.”
“There’s still this sense that there is a ceiling for this kind of music in Australia and artists tend to go overseas to build their careers but with the internet, particularly in the last couple of years, this music is now truly global,” he said.
While there remains many Australian producers who specialise in niche dance genres, the crossover hits are happening when electronic producers collaborate with pop acts.
“Empire of the Sun was more of a crossover than a purist thing because we always felt like it was taking the classic sound of the 70s and the most modern, classy electronic things such as Daft Punk and fusing it into this new combination,” Littlemore said.
Slumberjack’s Morgan Then and Fletcher Ehlers, titled their debut record out next month Dichotomy to reflect the collision of these musical worlds.
They cite the influence of Flume, WhatSoNot and Wonderland for emboldening them to create their dizzyingly eclectic mix of songs and instrumentals.
Their unique formula is working with their tracks generating more than 100 million streams.
“We think about this a lot because we’ve got that earlier fanbase who pride themselves on finding the secret gem on SoundCloud and now we have people who found out about us through Triple J with tracks like Fracture or Poison,” Ehlers said.
“So one of the points of this album was to introduce the newer, more fanbase to the crazy electronic based music we were writing, and to show the crazy music people that pop can be something interesting and fun and not lame.”
As the new guard makes its mark on the global airwaves, their crossover predecessors including The Presets’ Julian Hamilton and Kim Moyes and Paul Mac are defying the shelf life and fad nature of the genre to maintain careers into their third decades.
They are also heavily influencing the next wave of producers.
The classically trained Mac, who collaborates with everyone from Daniel Johns to emerging queer artists as well as lecturing at the Conservatorium of Music, just released a 20th anniversary remix of his 2001 pop smash Just The Thing.
He said he impresses on his students the importance of collaboration and community in the electronic music world.
“With the generation who have grown up on YouTube, everything is there to find, to go on a deep dive, and it lives on which is really exciting,” he said.
“And that is going to bring through a whole wave of 90s (influenced) stuff through now.”
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