Empire of the Sun

The Arc of Empire of the Sun

The pivots — what forced Empire of the Sun to reinvent.

1. 01

   The Sleepy Jackson Collision

   Steele was still signed to EMI as a folk-rocker when he and Littlemore started messing with electronic textures at Linear Recording in Sydney. This wasn't a planned career move but a byproduct of Steele's frustration with the traditional band format and Littlemore's obsession with disco production. The result was a sound that kept the acoustic guitar strums of the Sydney folk scene but buried them under layers of Yamaha DX7 and Korg Polysix leads. You can hear the tension on the debut—it’s half-indie, half-glam, and entirely focused on making the studio sound like a million-dollar spaceship.

2. 02

   The Big Budget Bloat

   By the time 'Ice on the Dune' rolled around in 2013, the duo had fully committed to a fictional mythology that required a massive crew and global recording stops from Santa Monica to New York. The production got polished to a blinding sheen, stripping away the grit of the debut in favor of EDM-adjacent drops and compressed, stadium-ready choruses. This was the era of maximum saturation where they stopped being a studio project and became a touring spectacle. It’s the sound of a band realizing they can headline festivals if they just turn the treble up and put on more face paint.

3. 03

   The Two Vines Reset

   Seeking a way out of the EDM trap, they decamped to Honolulu to record at Island Sound Studios with contributions from Wendy Melvoin of The Revolution and Lindsey Buckingham. Bringing in Prince and Fleetwood Mac royalty wasn't an accident; they wanted that analog, 80s session-player warmth to ground the digital synths. The record feels more organic and spaced-out, trading the frantic dancefloor energy for a mid-tempo groove that actually lets the songs breathe. It’s the first time since the beginning that they sounded like they were playing in a room together instead of being programmed into a grid.

Influences

• Fleetwood Mac — Luke Steele has explicitly cited Lindsey Buckingham's production on Tusk as the blueprint for his 'maniacal' attention to detail. You hear it in the layered vocal harmonies and the way acoustic guitars are treated as percussive elements against electronic drums. The fact that they eventually got Buckingham to play on 'Two Vines' just confirmed the obsession.
• Prince — The duo frequently references the Minneapolis sound and Prince's 80s run as their primary aesthetic North Star. The funky, high-register synth stabs and Steele’s use of falsetto are straight out of the 1999 sessions. They even hired Wendy Melvoin to bring that specific Revolution-era guitar grit to their later work.
• Daft Punk — Littlemore has pointed to 'Discovery' as the record that showed them how to merge robotic precision with human emotion. The heavy side-chain compression on their basslines and the 'filtered' disco house vibe on 'Standing on the Shore' is a direct nod to the French duo. They took the robot-human hybrid concept and just added more feathers.
• Eurythmics — The theatricality and the synth-heavy pop arrangements of Dave Stewart and Annie Lennox informed their entire visual-sonic identity. Steele has praised their ability to be 'art-school' while still topping the charts. You can hear that 1983-era Juno synth coldness underneath the warm vocals on almost every single they’ve released.
• Hall & Oates — In interviews during the 'Walking on a Dream' era, they consistently credited the blue-eyed soul duo for their approach to songwriting structure. The tight, R&B-influenced rhythmic pockets on 'We Are The People' are a modern translation of that Philly soul-meets-new-wave hybrid. It’s basically 'I Can't Go For That' updated for a rave in the Outback.