‘It’s a strange thing being faced with success’: Pnau’s next move after smash hit

Eight years ago, Sydney producer Nick Littlemore and I sat down in a sunny Darlinghurst office to pore over his latest Empire of the Sun record, Two Vines.

The third album from the duo – which is completed by Perth’s Luke Steele – was an exciting moment, of course, but what was more exciting was some information that the tall, silver-haired Littlemore had let slip during the interview. Pnau, his wildly popular group with fellow producer Peter Mayes that had spearheaded Australian dance in the mid-2000s, would soon be making a comeback.

Peter Mayes, Nick Littlemore and Sam Littlemore of Pnau.Credit: Cybele Malinowski

The band was putting the finishing touches on a song called Chameleon, Littlemore told me without hesitation, and it should be arriving pretty soon.

Unbeknown to us both sitting in that room at that moment, that little track called Chameleon would change everything. The crystalline, pinballing song would rocket Pnau back onto the airwaves and become one of their most successful singles. The album it was carved from, the prismatic Changa, seemed to stretch on for years – buoyed by singles like Go Bang and the title track.

It was a phenomenal, and somewhat unexpected, comeback for Pnau, who broke through with the cult classic Sambanova in 1999 before becoming a dance floor staple with gleefully haywire club tracks like Embrace and Wild Strawberries. But the party didn’t last forever: the two Pnau records that preceded Changa, 2011’s Soft Universe and 2012’s Elton John remix record Good Morning to the Night, flopped with audiences.

Littlemore has since said of Soft Universe that it was the “wrong record” and that the band had forgotten their dance roots. And with Empire of the Sun occupying Littlemore’s attention, many thought Pnau might have taken a permanent back seat.

I remind Littlemore of this Chameleon moment from our last interview when we again sit down together, this time separated by the Pacific Ocean as the producer beams in from Los Angeles. He smiles at the memory.

Littlemore (right) with Luke Steele in Empire of the Sun.

“It was so enlightening and invigorating for us,” Littlemore says of the aftermath of Changa. “I don’t know how we arrived at that moment, but we were fortunate enough to keep coming up with these records that tapped into that crazy energy; it was blissful.”

It’s an appropriate place to start discussing the band’s new record Hyperbolic, he says, because this album is very much carved from the Changa cloth.

Hyperbolic has been a long time in the making. The band (now a trio with the addition of Nick’s brother Sam) originally intended to pull it together quickly in the wake of Changa’s success and the popularity of their 2019 single Solid Gold. But the slow machine of the music industry got in the way, Littlemore says, and there was some political juggling behind the scenes after the band changed labels which tied them up for longer than they wanted.

There were other battles to be dealt with as well. In 2019, Littlemore was forced to take six months off to recover from Ramsay Hunt syndrome, a neurological illness that affects facial nerves. The illness paralysed half his face and fixed one eye open for months. “It did change me physically,” Littlemore says. “My hearing is not the same, definitely not. It can distort. I can get fatigued quite easily, so I used to play fairly loud and now not at all.”

During that unsteady time, Littlemore and the band got a call from their old friend Elton John. John had been a steadfast fan of the band since coming across their self-titled album in 2007, so much so that he set them loose to create Good Morning to the Night. While catching up backstage at one of his Farewell Yellow Brick Road shows in the Hunter Valley, John asked Pnau whether they’d be up for making more music together.

The band promptly set to work, and Mayes – who was “just on one”, as Littlemore says – disappeared for a few days to sketch out an idea he had. When he emerged, Cold Heart had been born. The shimmering dance-pop track twists together John’s Sacrifice, Kiss the Bride, Where’s the Shoorah? and Rocket Man (I Think It’s Going to Be a Long, Long Time). Elton pulled in pop star Dua Lipa to provide additional vocals, and then it was out. The reaction, Littlemore laughs, was “bananas”.

The track raked in more than a billion streams and scored John his first UK #1 in more than 15 years. While Pnau were overjoyed, the massive success took an unexpected toll.

“It’s just weird,” Littlemore says of Cold Heart’s aftermath. “It’s a really strange thing … being faced with success. I think it took some time for us internally in the band to get through it. Success is a great thing, but it changes the way everything’s perceived and it’s such a delicate ecosystem being in a band, especially being in a band for quite a while.”

Hyperbolic can essentially be split into two: the songs that came before Cold Heart (which isn’t on the album) and the songs that came after. Following that track, the band found themselves in studio sessions with some of the world’s biggest artists: Troye Sivan, Khalid and Bebe Rexha are dotted across the album. Littlemore, always an enthusiastic collaborator, found the experience strange at times.

“When you get to work with these very big, big stars, they often come with other people and then you’re not only trying to get close and understand the star artist in the room, there’s all these other gatekeepers,” he says. “I don’t know. It’s more complicated than it needs to be some of the time.”

The best moments on Hyperbolic aren’t the A-list features, but rather when Pnau indulge their true club kid selves and let it all hang out. Standout track Nostalgia is an updated ’90s rave cut, while All the Time leaps and bounds with the shouted refrain, “Don’t you wanna feel good?” Opener AEIOU brings Littlemore’s two main projects together for the first time, a collaboration with Empire of the Sun’s Luke Steele.

The album is dizzyingly fun and vivid, like all Pnau records. Littlemore speaks warmly of it, but it also becomes clear throughout our interview that the band is keen to reset after the Cold Heart experience.

“I do feel that the next body of work we’re going to do is going to be a truer reflection of where we’re at than the firestorm that it’s been post Cold Heart,” Littlemore admits. “It’s been super cool, but I want to bring it back to a quieter thing … Imogen Heap once said something about ‘finding the crop circles in the carpet’. Just simple beauty around the two of us or one other person, not always this enormous top-liner and all that comes along with that. It’s awesome, but it’s a different energy.”

As always with Littlemore, there’s so much more tumbling down the pipeline. Before we finish, I ask when we can expect to hear new Empire of the Sun material, who are yet to follow up Two Vines. ”It’s just about to launch,” Littlemore reveals. “We just shot an incredible film with an amazing director and team from the States and Canada out in the jungles of Thailand, which was a hell of a journey,” he says. “It’s been a long time coming.”

Pnau’s new album Hyperbolic is out on Friday.

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