Empire of the Sun’s new album is four years late. Blame the spirit

Emperor Luke Steele is dressed to kill in ghost-white kabuki face-paint and wide-brimmed black fedora. His long red silk robe and studded black stole swish around his ankles. Silver ornaments glimmer like sacred artefacts inside his vestments.

Lord Littlemore — Nick to his friends — has gone the tinsel shaman look. His voluminous shaggy crimson overcoat hangs open to reveal a heavy breastplate of multicoloured plastic beads. On his forehead, diamante sunbeams radiate from his third eye to a perfectly tousled silver quiff.

Never mind that it’s 11am on a Tuesday and I am their lone audient. This is official Empire of the Sun business and casual wear has no place in it. As the cosmic visitors blend into the gaudy ’70s furniture of a Sydney studio, I mentally tally the other acts who have bothered to don full regalia for my audio recorder. Kiss, TISM, um …

“Right at the start we said: ‘We want to make a band that the 10-year-old version of ourselves would have a poster of on our bedroom wall’,” Littlemore says. “That’s not going to be some dude staring at his shoes, wearing flannel. It’s going to be something wild and full of imagination and danger and romance.”

Steele and Littlemore have been waiting “til the spirit’s right”.Credit: Melanie Swerdan

It was also going to be more successful than the two musicians from opposite ends of the Australian continent could have imagined. With its exhilarating dance-pop sheen and fantasy imagery, their first album, Walking on a Dream, was a worldwide hit in 2008.

More recently, its title song has gone exponentially ballistic via high-profile commercial placements – Honda Civic in the US, Tourism WA back home – and countless TikTok creators with their sharing fingers dancing.

“Those songs came out the week my daughter Sunny was born and now she’s 15,” says Steele. “Kids we could never even imagine being alive are now loving this project. I think it’s the greatest gift to an artist: that a new generation checks you out and loves you.”

The duo’s new album, Ask That God, is the fourth since Steele shelved his Perth indie band, the Sleepy Jackson, to collaborate with the trippy stranger from Pnau: a Sydney electronic act championed by future collaborator Elton John. “I saw them on Rage about 2am one night,” Steele recalls. “It totally blew my mind.”

In terms of style and tone, the Sleepy Jackson and Pnau were not obvious bedfellows. But at a publisher-brokered meeting at Sydney’s Darlo Bar, the pair immediately recognised a certain conceptual connection.

“Luke was wearing a suit and carrying a suitcase and I thought, this is the coolest guy,” Littlemore recalls with amusement. “Every time [we met] there was something different in the suitcase. It might have been a bunch of bananas, or a typewriter, or a telephone …”

‘It’s the greatest gift to an artist: that a new generation checks you out and loves you.’

Luke Steele

“I think I was trying to be like William Burroughs or something, carrying all this stuff,” Steele says with a laugh. “Nick would have notebooks and more notebooks; like Jack Kerouac sitting there writing and writing non-stop.

“I went up to his house and I had my classic John Lennon-style Rickenbacker [guitar]. Nick was like, ‘Here, take this coin, grab this bit of metal, just make some sounds,’ and he was straight away cutting up and sampling my guitar and making these rhythms and beats and that was the beginning.”

“We’ve always collided in colour,” Littlemore says in his soft-focus psychedelic way. “I think we were probably both kids that drew outside the lines.”

Steele collided with blues first. His father, Rick Steele, is a roots guitar legend out west. Back in the mid ’90s, the longstanding president of the Perth Blues Club would often introduce his gifted son for a turn in the spotlight. In 2008, the kid would return the favour by producing his dad’s new album.

“Every Tuesday night after the club, there’d be 30 or 40 blues guys at the house and I always sought knowledge and wisdom in that,” he says. “I’d sit there and they’d tell stories about Buddy Guy and BB King and show me chords. I was so lucky like that.

“At high school I didn’t really fit in so I spent weekends with my four-track [casette recorder] trying to remake ‘the White Album’. I kind of fell into this laboratory mindset, ‘I’m gonna show you – I’m gonna make the greatest records’.”

Littlemore’s creative awakening was less traditional. “LSD was the main thing,” he says. “That changed my perspective on reality when I was 13. That shift was really profound to me. It’s not something I do a lot of. But I discovered that creativity was the best outlet for dreams.”

Sound and vision were equal passions. At around 16, he acquired his first synthesiser to score a homemade movie titled Stigmata. By the time he and Steele met, widescreen visual aspirations were hardwired to their designs.

With Ask That God they take a quantum leap in an album-length video shot in Thailand by Canadian director Michael Maxxis. The narrative is being teased one single at a time – Changes, Music On The Radio, Cherry Blossom, AEIOU – in the lead up to the album’s reveal at the end of this month.

“His concept was like a child’s imagination; like all of our favourite films as kids: The Goonies and Flight of the Navigator,” says Steele. His son, Cruz, plays the young innocent as the two Empyreans play to type: enigmatic avatars visiting from some cosmic-spiritual realm.

“That kind of vision we talked about when we started the band,” Steele says. “We’d been in guitar bands and electronic bands where you just try and fit in with the scene around you … but this was distinctly us. It was like, ‘Let’s go where Bowie went. Let’s go with Prince. Let’s go where all our favourite acts go’.

“The stage show, we knew, had to be epic,” he says of their lavish smoke-and-costumes spectacle. Amazingly, the sticky carpet grind had no role in their conquest. Empire of the Sun made a grand-scale debut on the Park Life Festival that toured five state capitals in 2009.

“We were trying to get an elephant, tigers,” Steele says as they collapse into laughter. “Then we found out the elephant was going to be $10,000. And then it literally needed a massive barrel of peanuts!”

Littlemore is unrepentant about such grandiose visions.

“The dream should be impossible,” he says. “I think that’s always been challenging for our managers. We don’t have a limit to our imagination. And we don’t see why we should because I think it’s our strength. You get to great places by being unrelenting, creative, pushing the force. Because, you know, magical things can happen. You just have to hang in there.”

It’s easier for him to say that. Littlemore opted out of live performance early, leaving his partner to wear the galactic robes and headdresses and face-paint while juggling body-mounted smoke machines and guitars and microphones in front of a cast of musicians and dancers on the gruelling international festival circuit.

“Luke is the troubadour. And I am the scribe,” he says. “On stage, I mean, I wonder what I would do?”

The Emperor says: “At first it was really hard for me … because I’ve grown up in that traditional way of making a record and then you tour. But yeah, as we moved into it, it was obviously for the best.

“Every now and then I had this dream where Nick is a wizard. And there are these amps in the four corners of the room, and he’d point to one and it would burst into life. That’s Nick in the studio. He commands the machines. It’s like he has a language with the drum machines, and it’s quite fascinating to watch. It makes total sense that he’s the guru of the studio and I go out on the road.”

Littlemore agrees that the band’s success owes something to his grip on the techno zeitgeist. “But at the same time, because Luke has had that tutelage of real songs … that is really the heart of this. The technology is dope, but without his soul, we don’t have a project. We just have some cool backing tracks.”

It’s easy, sitting cross-legged on nutty modular furniture in a tangle of tinsel and love beads, to fall into the dreamworld that Empire of the Sun commands. They’re true believers because their dream came true, to the tune of 5.5 million albums, 7.6 billion streams, fantasy video shoots in Thailand and top-dollar offers from the world’s biggest festivals.

“The label wanted this record four years ago, but we stand by the truth,” says Steele. “We only deliver it once it’s been delivered to us.”

To an extent, tedious realities like record company deadlines are just someone else’s bad trip. “The label wanted this record four years ago, but we stand by the truth,” the Emperor says. “We only deliver it once it’s been delivered to us.” But he concedes that the duo has had “quite a few trials and tribulations” in almost 20 years together.

“Like people say, new level, new devil. There’s such a liberation once we get through but each level we go to, man, we don’t get given anything for free. We get tested every album. And this one’s no exception.”

At the risk of harshing the vibe, I recall the time we last spoke. Shadow had fallen on the Empire in 2022. That record company deadline was a sore point. Steele had fled Los Angeles with his young family, bought a log cabin dubbed Eccentric Farm on a private lake in northern California, and made a meditative solo album titled Listen to the Water.

“That was amazing for me,” he says now. “That was one of the things that helped with the rebirth of Empire. I think there’s been something within me, maybe in the last 10 years, where I needed to feel worthy to stand on my own and do that. I went through my full Brian Wilson shedding-of-the-skin, got the record mastered 10 times and had the full-on mental breakdown I have every couple of years.”

Littlemore, meanwhile, diverted his energies into the first Pnau album in seven years, Hyperbolic, while Elton John played their Good Morning To The Night collaboration to packed stadiums around the world.

“We’ve both got egos,” he says. “We have a lot of opinions and a lot of ideas. But at some point, the one word we always come back to is surrender. We had to surrender to that which we made together. That was more important, ultimately. And we’ve done it again.”

It appears so. The advance singles from Ask That God have already clocked tens of millions of streams. Doubtless to the frustration of the aforementioned management, Steele has so far declined “some pretty massive festivals around the world and some pretty big fees” as he waits for signs to align.

“I just want to let that evolve,” he says, hands in surrender to the gods. “I want to let the vision of that be born. We always need to wait till the spirit’s right.”

Ask That God is out through Universal on July 26. The band tours Australia in Oct/Nov. Tickets: https://www.frontiertouring.com/empireofthesun