NEWS
EVENTS
New Release: Ice on the Dune
Indie | Monday 17th June 2013 | Abby
The boys are back with another experimentally vivid album which will take you on an electronic-rock, synth-pop journey, jump on board the Ice On the Dune and be transported to a different world.
They are renowned for their visually beautiful, vocally gorgeous, instrumentally invigorating music and correlating videos and they are back! After meeting for the first time in 2000, Empire of the Sun’s Luke Steele and Nick Littlemore intermittently worked together; however, they remained separate acts working in their groups The Sleepy Jackson and Pnau, respectively. Working together revealed a creative chemistry between the two, and in 2008 the Empire of the Sun was formed. Since the release of their first debut album, Walking On the Dream in 2008, the duo have acquired two extra unofficial members, producers Peter Mayers and Danny Sloane. This quartet is largely diverse substituting a one genre theme for a range of genres of electronic-rock, synth-pop, and indie to create a whole new world of music. Luke Steele stated:
“I live in this world that I created/I did it for you.”
Empire of the Sun’s Walking On A Dream successfully created this world of the weird, wonderful, and ultimately gratifying. This world is visually represented in their music videos which are colourful, vivid, and unusual, with every detail being absolutely captivating. The boys have done it again with the conception of their latest album Ice On the Dune, due to be released tomorrow 18th June. Plucking the harp, strong guitar riffs, marching beats, and gorgeous vocals feature consistently in this album. Each and every track offers something musically riveting, such as the hit single ‘Alive’ which reveals a new pace Steele’s somber voice to compliment the 80s inspired instrumental pitch. The title track ‘Ice on the Dune’ presents wistful choruses, while ‘I’ll Be Around’ illustrates an ethereal touch to Steele’s voice and Littlemore’s instrumentals. Each track produced by these boys is simply phenomenal, but Steele notes they faced challenges in this album:
“We really got tested on this record; we had flights and disappeared to different parts in the world.”
The challenges and tests that Empire of the Sun faced with this album proved beneficial in the end, as the result of the album is magnificence. The quartet’s constructed fantastic universe has once again being represented in the visual spectacle music video for their first hit single from the album, ‘Alive’. Steele’s exaggerated and recurrent blue costume, face-paint, and head piece once again features, while Littlemore wears a militaristic/matrix outfit. The boys live up to what Steele called himself and Littlemore, “fruitcakes”, but who doesn’t love a great fruitcake? This music video not only includes extravagant costumes, but it also offers wonderful landscapes of cliffs at the oceans edge, the desert, and forests, and an intense exaggeration of colour, which conjures an exceptionally strong emotional response.
Check out the music video for the track ‘Alive’ here and “Say hello to the future”.
Enjoy!
Written By Abby D @AbbyDonkin
