LOCATING Empire Of The Sun’s Luke Steele is proving difficult. One half of the award-winning Australian electronic duo is 20 minutes late for our video call and he’s locked in a studio in Hawaii. But when he does emerge, he’s in good spirits and full of apologies.
“We decided there was no better time to start the next record, right as this new one is getting released,” says Steele who with Nick Littlemore releases Ask That God, their fourth album, today. “We are recharged and ready to go,” he says. “After Two Vines (2016 album) we got quite exhausted and everything stopped working.
Nothing was gelling. “At the start of the pandemic, I was instrumental saying, ‘That’s it, I’m done, I’m leaving’,” he explains. “I told Nick, management, the record company that the band was over.
That I was never doing another record. And I left. “I made a solo record and moved to northern California, but then piece by piece, I started to realise what I was missing and what was so beautiful about Empire in the first place.
“I’d work with people and think, ‘That’s cool, but it’s not working with Nick,’ and then start falling back in love with Empire again. “Then Nick and I got back in the studio, and it really has been great. The hardest part of being in a band that’s had success is there really is extreme pressure.
“With Empire, when the spirit is right, we sound like nothing else. We’ve made a few albums now and so we’ve broadened the palat.