In a recent interview, Empire Of The Sun songwriter Nick Littlemore confessed that his giddy synth pop came from a very dark place. “I have quite a remarkable ability to disappear at the drop of a hat,” he said. “I have done it to my parents. To my brothers. To my friends. To my loved ones.”
He wasn’t speaking metaphorically. Six months after Littlemore and Empire Of The Sun partner Luke Steele (of The Sleepy Jackson) released their debut album Walking On A Dream in 2009, he went missing – did a runner, in fact. His timing could not have been more unfortunate as Steel was in the process of turning Empire into a live act (which he proceeded to do without his bandmate’s involvement, bringing the group to Oxegen in 2010). Thus, the duo’s second LP comes with a lot of below-the-waterline melodrama.
Cleaving to the euphoric electro pop of their first record, Ice On The Dune has a default setting of giddy exuberance –when Steele and Littlemore sing “loving every minute ‘cos you make you me feel so alive” on single ‘Alive’ they are, it is clear, expecting to be taken at face value. As you get deeper in, however, more nuance – and darkness – is discernible: ‘Celebrate’, a Justice-style electro-metal stomper, is angry rather than joyous, and the Kraftwerk-esque ‘Disarm’ conveys a chilly Mitteleuropa melancholy. At such moments the happiest band on the planet sound suddenly, devastatingly, sad and the listener has a sense of peeking behind the curtain and receiving a stolen glimpse of where reality ends...

Key Track: 'Alive'