Empire of the Sun

One Liner: Falsetto laced-synth pop behind that huge "Walking on a Dream" track
Wikipedia Genre: electropop, synth-pop, dance-rock, electro-rock, new wave
Home: Sydney

Poster Position: Top Row - Line 2
Day: Friday
Both Weekends.

Thoughts:  Several people I know were excited to see these dudes on the lineup, but they are just not something I am familiar with at all.  I think I may have always thought that their big hit (the only song I recognize in here that wasn't featured on a rapper's album) was by MGMT or Milky Chance or M83 or Passion Pit.  Some other synthesizer band with a singer who does weird things with his voice.  But yes, I recognize the big hit for sure.

"Walking on a Dream" has 1.1 billion streams on Spotify.  The singer with the white line across his face looks like Bowen Yang (one of the current SNL actors) mixed with Jordan Peele.  Tell me I'm wrong!  It is a fine song, I just don't necessarily go out of my way for synth pop tracks.  But yeah, sure, that is catchy.

Do you remember the movie Empire of the Sun?  That was the first movie I can remember watching that felt like it was four full days long.  It was Speilberg, so it felt like required watching, but my memory of it was that it was the longest film ever made.  Wikipedia says 2:34, so I guess that was me being 11 years old that was talking...

This band is not that movie.  Or the book the movie was based upon.  This is an Australian duo - Luke Steele and Nick Littlemore - formed in Sydney in 2007.  Their first album was 2008's Walking on a Dream, and blew the doors off of their fame.  Double platinum in Australia and gold in the U.S.  Wikipedia says they had originally conceived of this music as being studio-only, once the title track exploded, they decided to go for freaky visual overload with giant graphics and many dancers and Steele on a pedestal wearing "a gigantic metallic headpiece and his usual 'Ming The Merciless' robe."  Right.  The usual.  Littlemore opted out of performing the songs live, and it sounds like that stance held true for the entirety of that first tour.

After that initial huge album (with their second-biggest streamer, "We Are The People" also on there with 707.7 millin streams), they never caught that much fame again.  The majority of the songs on that initial disc have less than ten million streams, and most on the back half have less than 5 million.  Interestingly, the track "Half Mast" from this album ended up becoming the beat for a Mac Miller track on his 2010 album K.I.D.S., which is how I knew the sound of that song in the first place.  Mac called it "The Spins," and it is SO MUCH BETTER than the original version with him bopping over the top.  Almost a billion streams for Mac's song (and 97.7 million for the original).  Ten times more popular.  Maybe they should collaborate with rappers more often?

Their next disc was 2013's Ice on the Dune, which also generally flopped.  At the time, Steele gained media attention by comparing Ice on the Dune with Daft Punk's 2013 album release Random Access Memories, stating: "They had a great marketing campaign, but we’ve got better songs."  Riiiiight.  Well, one track from that album blew up and was used for a bunch of random things: the intro video for Google's 2013 I/O, part of the intro video for a new Yahoo! logo, in the movie Dumb and Dumber To, in FIFA 14, and in the end credits of the 2013 film Paranoia.  313.3 million streams.

Yeah, I don't get it.  Generic synths and generic lyrics.  I cannot imagine how that song was integrated into the second Dumb and Dumber movie.  Well, there you go.  Matches it so well!

Interestingly, the band wrote at least two other songs for that movie.  Also interesting, it looks like "Walking on a Dream" only finally blew up in the U.S. after a Honda Civic commercial was released in 2016, which shot the song up to #3 on the Billboard alternative chart.  Kind of crazy that it was not the actual release of the song that made it big here, but a Honda commercial.

By the way, they claim their name has nothing to do with the book or movie.  Which I find to be unbelievable.  Littlemore claims: "the name comes more from the idea of ... the fact that we're traveling around the world going to all the places of empires of the civilization where the sun has been a theme of worship. It's not based on the Ballard novel nor the Spielberg film of the same name."  Riiiiiiiiight.  "No, man, my new band named Star Wars has nothing to do with those movies, man.  It's just like the way that stars have always seemed at war with the cosmos, man!"

2016's Two Vines was next, and again the majority of the album has few streams.  One big track though with "High and Low" with 144.8 million streams.

That one sounds kind of familiar, it must have gotten some radio play around these parts.  I probably still thought it was MGMT this whole time though.  The non-Jordan Peele dude cut all his lovely locks off!  That song was featured in FIFA 17 - smart!  After that, the band admitted that they struggled to write anything new during the pandemic over Zoom and whatnot.  BUt they still had a hit song pop out in 2020, when Wiz Khalifa released a single called "The Thrill" that pretty much just yused the entire "Walking on a Dream" track just with Wiz throwing in some lame raps over the top of the original song.  Still got 519 million streams and is good for the fourth-most streamed song for this band.

But then the lads came back together to release 2024's Ask That God.  No real hits that touch anywhere near the heights of their prior hits.  Two of the songs on here don't even crack a million streams.  The top track is "Music on the Radio," with 23.4 million streams.

Catchy stuff again.  Actually, makes me think of that Daft Punk album that this guy slagged.

I am actually terribly disappointed in my reaction to this music.  My friend Jason had texted me that he was really excited about them being on the poster, calling them "bad ass."  When I read that, I figured that this had to be a rock band - I was imagining Highly Suspect or Nothing But Thieves.  Instead, just a pile of flasetto synth pop.  Not sure if I will get to see them either way, I feel like Cage the Elephant or Hozier would be the trump to this band, but who knows.