Empire Of The Sun, AKA Luke Steele and Nick Littlemore, had the world walking on a dream in 2008 and feeling alive with their second album, 2013’sIce On The Dune.
After selling more than three million copies across their first two records and earning eight ARIA Awards, however, the rising stars entered a period of relative silence.
Three years later, the ostentatious alt-electro performers have returned from the studio and are ready to guide listeners through the lush realms of their third album, Two Vines. The Australian-made, California-based duo have already shared a piece of their jungle paradise with the record’s title track and the singles ‘High And Low’ and ‘To Her Door’. According to Littlemore, the new material found its way to him after he embraced various practices of meditation.
“There was a period where things started to really reveal themselves to me,” he says. “It was such a profoundly clear message that it was one that I couldn’t ignore. I’d always felt as though creativity was not my own but that I was listening to the cosmic consciousness, that it would flow through me like a river or shoot through me like an arrow or a lightning bolt. I’ve always been aware of the other or the unseeable and that sort of stuff, but having these deeper meditative experiences has taught me that the path that I’ve always been on is very much a real thing.
“I look back on notebooks from years ago and I was already writing about these things without being completely aware of it, but I feel much more connected to it now than I ever have. I want to share that with the world. I want to share good thoughts and I want people to understand that this world is a fragile, precious and special place.”
Finding meaning beyond his own creative energy, Littlemore explains that Two Vines is a call for people around the world to return to nature and appreciate their surroundings.
“I had a few visionary experiences in the last year or two and they all led me back to nature. We really need to start listening to it. Looking at ancient cultures, indigenous cultures, the people have understood for tens of thousands of years how to live with the planet, not against it and not on top of it. I wanted to make some kind of message that tells people to listen to the world rather than themselves or to greed, money, power or any of these shallow pursuits, because they are ultimately meaningless.
“Two Vines is very much about those visionary experiences and the idea of nature taking back the planet, and to a lesser extent, about shamanism and ancient cultures and how people used to live so freely and easily with Mother Earth. Two Vines, for me, really is about all the light [that] lives in your head tonight. I’ve been to the end of the universe in these dreams, and all there is is love. It’s light and love – that’s all we are. Infinitely complex, but at the same time the message is very simple.”
Translating these newfound ideas through their music, Empire Of The Sun have stripped back their signature production to create a more concentrated sound than ever. Admittedly, even Littlemore himself wasn’t completely satisfied with the state of their second album.
“It felt very aggressive to me and slightly plastic,” he says. “I didn’t want to do something that had that violent EDM thing about it. I think we gave in to popular culture a bit on the second record, and [this time around] I really wanted to restore the warmth and the beauty of the first record. It was a very much concerted effort to turn the drums down and turn the music up.
“We wanted all the songs to possess a simplicity. Even if some of the thoughts are like constellations and direct messages, we wanted everything to possess a simplicity that people could understand.”
In order to construct the appropriate sounds, Steele and Littlemore moved from the confines of their Los Angeles studio to spend time in Hawaii alongside their co-producer Peter Mayes and regular collaborator Donnie Sloan.
“It was a beautiful time, a very profound time,” says Littlemore. “We’d been working non-stop on this project – when I say ‘we’, I mean the four of us because Peter has been with us since day one and Donnie has been a collaborator of ours since the very beginning, so it was almost like a holiday. In that very relaxed state it was really easy to write. We didn’t spend a tremendous amount of time in the studio, which is something we normally do; we have been known to stay in the studio for 36 hours.
“I took a troupe of percussionists deep into the jungle at about three or four in the morning and we played up until the sunrise. That was a very special event. I took back the files and showed Luke what we’d done and he was pretty amazed by it. I also took them into a cave and we played until the dawn in there. As the light starts coming in you started to realise the cave of course is covered in spiders, but in the middle of the night you couldn’t notice, so it was fine,” he laughs.
The other moving parts in Empire Of The Sun’s creative circle are pianist/arranger Henry Hey, bassist Tim Lefebvre from David Bowie’s Blackstar band, Wendy Melvoin from Prince’s Revolution, and Fleetwood Mac guitarist/vocalist Lindsey Buckingham – all of whom are featured on Two Vines.
“To invite these luminaries into our studio, it’s a very arresting moment before they walk through the door, but as soon as they do and they plug their guitar, piano or bass in, everything starts to flow as music generally does,” says Littlemore. “It’s such a privilege to work with all of the people we work with – for example, working with Lindsey Buckingham from Fleetwood Mac. The first concert I ever went to was Fleetwood Mac in Australia in the ’80s, so I had a very deep connection to his music. He was such a kind and generous soul.”
A tireless and tenacious team, Empire Of The Sun are set to return to home soil as festival headliners for Sydney’s FOMO 2017. With Littlemore already teasing their alternative, unreleased material, Two Vines is surely not the last we’ll hear from these leaders of self-created, electronic musical concepts.
“We wrote a lot of music for this record, some of which is on the record and some of which will come out in the next years – I don’t know how long. There’s another song that we wrote with Lindsey that’s not on the record which is utterly beautiful; we had a gospel choir and all kinds of things. We are always making music, and it’s not a vault rivalling Prince’s, but it’s a vault of beautiful, colourful, positive light that we hope to share one day with the world.”
Two Vines is out Friday October 28 through EMI/Universal. Empire Of The Sunperform at FOMO 2017, Parramatta Park, Sunday January 8.
