Why Are Empire Of The Sun Back? Because It's 'Good For Humanity'

“We're quite proficient when it comes to writing the music of Empire,” says Nick Littlemore – the producing and co-writing half of Empire Of The Sun, who describes his role in the band as “the guy in the studio with the machines”. He turns to his bandmate, frontman Luke Steele, with a knowing look. “Releasing it, however,” he concedes, “is a whole other thing.”

Indeed, by the time the new album Ask That God hits shelves, it will have been nearly eight whole years since the release of the duo's last effort, Two Vines. At least half of those years have been spent with both Steele and Littlemore filling up hard drive after hard drive with new ideas, only a fragment of which ultimately cut the proverbial mustard. “There might have been as many as 1200 songs that we wrote in that time to get to the 12 we have here,” says Littlemore.

“We're definitely sentient beings who are out there thinking and experiencing culture around us, taking like a bowerbird might do every time we find a bit of blue to create this tapestry of sorts.” Steele, taken by this analogy, nods in agreement.

“We're conduits,” he adds. “We're hunter-gatherers. We find certain things – whether it's 30,000 feet up on a plane, waiting for a train in New York City, or in Tokyo at 3 am – and they come together with this spiritual intuition. It's quite beautiful when it happens.”

With a new album arrives a tour, and Empire Of The Sun are set to tour Australia for a triumphant homecoming run this November. Having last played down under just last year (their first tour at home since 2017), it seems those shows were warm-ups for what was to come.

The Aussie electro-pop pioneers will perform at Sydney’s Hordern Pavilion on Thursday, 24 October, before heading to Melbourne’s Sidney Myer Music Bowl (Saturday, 26 October), Brisbane’s Riverstage (Tuesday, 29 October), and wrap up the run at Perth’s Red Hill Auditorium on Friday, 1 November. The latter show is sold out – you can find tickets to the other shows here.

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Following the release of Two Vines, both Littlemore and Steele ventured elsewhere – the former reuniting with PNAU for their explosive comeback album Changa and the latter teaming up with Daniel Johns for a new project titled Dreams.

The pair reconvened in 2019, however, to begin work on the next step for Empire in a new environment – in this case, Japan. “I've always found it such an inspiring place, but because it was Luke's first time there – and the fact we were together – made it much more profound,” says Littlemore. When it came time to attempt recording, however, the duo found themselves hitting a stumbling block.

“We thought we'd get a record done right then and there,” says Littlemore, “but if we've learned anything from this band, it's that these records tell you when they're ready. They're beasts. They're dragons. They have their own timelines, if you will.” Steele does not recall the early sessions for a new album with any kind of fondness: “It was like walking through quicksand,” he says. “The spirit was there, but we were just finding it so hard.

“When the pandemic hit, it felt like we had to let it all go just to see what would happen. When we came back to it, the songs that floated to the top were ones that had a strong feeling of hope to them. They had this beautiful energy, like the shackles had been broken, and they were part of this great restarting. The phrase 'new era' kept coming up a lot, and that became a strong theme of Ask That God. It became clear we were going through a metamorphosis.”

The winds of change bustle against the steely bass, textured synth lines and glistening choruses of Ask That God. Tracks like the six-minute Rhapsodize seem to float mid-air with layers of acoustic guitars and airy vocals, while Happy flutters and steadily builds into a euphoric release. They even get a little disco on the sprightly Music On The Radio, which feels like a logical continuation of PNAU's breakthrough Elton John smash Cold Heart.

While it's still part of what one has come to expect from the duo, it may well also be the brightest and most pop-oriented of the four – even including their triple-platinum 2008 debut, Walking On A Dream. To Littlemore, however, there's more to it than merely a sunny disposition. “These are songs that are good for humanity,” he says matter-of-factly.

“For us, music is a way of conjuring magic and putting it back out into the world. That's what this album is to us. Humanity needs good deeds. It needs faith, and it needs earnest, honest, true feelings. It felt like the right collection of songs to come forth. I don't think it would have turned out this way had we not gone through such profound change in the eight years since we released an album. It's a record of the time we went through, and it comes with its own sense of knowing.”

As for its ambiguous title, Steele clarifies that the pair haven't gone Hillsong. Instead, Ask That God is a reflection on personal spirituality and actualising your best self. “They say the image of God is man fully alive,” Steele muses. “When I envision man fully alive, it's man exhilarated and inspired. It's man full of vision and full of hope. I think we were really inspired by that. We want to go higher. We want to build a world that's Heaven on Earth – that's bigger than you can imagine. If it's possible, then the dream isn't big enough. It should be impossible. That's the point.”

Perhaps one of the most unique aspects of the creative process for Ask That God was its cast of characters. Usually a direct collaboration between Steele and Littlemore, with help from longtime producer Peter Mayes, the duo's new album instead boasts a litany of Scandinavian pop songwriters. Among them were Magnus Lidehäll (Madonna, Kylie Minogue), Pontus Winnberg (Britney Spears, Katy Perry) and the duo of Vargas & Lagola (David Guetta, Avicii, Ghost). Empire lovingly referred to their new cohorts simply as “the Swedes” and found themselves in a stream of fruitful songwriting sessions.

“It was nice to work with the Swedes because they understood us,” says Littlemore. “More to the point, they made an effort to try and understand us. We'd obviously always been inspired by the way Swedish writers craft pop music, but they, in turn, were inspired by us. We weren't meeting on the grounds of one for you, one for me. It was an exchange – and a humbling one at that.”

“We'd tried collaborating in the past, but it never really worked,” adds Steele. “They would always try and make it like, 'this is what it should sound like.' That's never been how I've seen it. To me, it's more like we're a river – we want people to jump in and flow with us. The writers that worked on Ask That God came in with such an elegance – they flowed with us, but they also opened doors for us. It doesn't always work, obviously, so we were very fortunate that it did.”

It's not just in a recorded sense that Empire Of The Sun have plotted their comeback, either. Never a group to do things by halves, they have also enlisted Canadian filmmaker Michael Maxxis for what has essentially turned into a film of sorts – telling a cinematic story across a run of visually stunning music videos. With audio and visual cinematics, it wouldn’t be too far off to suggest that their forthcoming national tour will also be ambitious, gorgeous, and impeccable to witness.

“We knew that we wanted to come back with a bang – we weren't about to settle for a visualiser,” says Steele of their audio-visual ambitions.

“We spent a year meeting with different directors trying to find the thread for the million ideas that we had – and, crucially, someone who could weave them together. A friend of ours said we had to meet Michael, so we set up a Zoom meeting. Right away, there was this beautiful energy – he was namedropping all our favourite films and directors, and we loved the way he talked about film. Every song we'd send him came back with these mind-blowing treatments for videos. We went to shoot four clips and ended up making double that – and they all look incredible.”

Well before the announcement of Ask That God, Empire Of The Sun returned for a run of homecoming Australian shows in February of 2023 – marking their first anywhere in three-and-a-half years. With sold-out crowds greeting Steele and singing back to all of the band's hits, the shows lit a fire under the elaborately costumed frontman – who is excited to return once again in October with an all-new live show based around the album. “It's felt so good having that human energy back again,” he says of performing live.

“You can see why the demand for live shows have gone through the roof in the last couple of years – people need that tangible interaction. They need to feel the heart beating.” Although he's never appeared on-stage as part of Empire – save for a cameo during, of all things, a performance on Ellen – Littlemore has nonetheless been wholly supportive of the live show and its development – particularly in its newest form, which is being developed as we speak.

“Luke, Jodi [Steele, Luke's wife and Empire's creative director] and the whole team have handled it so brilliantly,” he says. It's such a beautiful show. It's not necessary for me to be on stage when you've already got the voice of a generation up there.”

Empire Of The Sun are putting out Ask That God with hopes that the near-decade away will disintegrate instantly across listening to its dozen tracks. Wherever you are in life, whatever you worship and whatever dreams you walk upon, the duo simply hope you find a way to give in.

“We talk about surrender a lot, and that's what we hope people do with Ask That God,” says Littlemore. Surrender to the record, and surrender to your emotions – whatever they may be. If it doesn't speak to you? Don't worry about it. All we ask is that you give it a listen.” Steele agrees: “It'll find who it's meant to find and go where it wants to go,” he adds. “Our job was to put everything possible we had into it, and now it's the best possible conduit for everything we've been trying to do.”

Ask That God will be released via EMI Australia on Friday, 26 July. You can pre-order/pre-save the album here. Empire Of The Sun are coming home for an epic tour this October and November – you can find the details below.