PNAU

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Essential Albums

  • Changa
    Changa
    Changa

    After the more pronounced electropop of 2011’s Soft Universe, PNAU’s fifth studio set marks a return to the pure dance music of albums such as 1999’s Sambanova. It took some work to get there, though—a clutch of songs founding duo Nick Littlemore and Peter Mayes recorded for the album in 2014 were either shelved or radically reworked before they settled on the record’s direction. Key to finding the sound was the decision to work with New York vocalist Kira Divine, who features heavily across the album, and whose voice provided a focus to which Littlemore, Mayes, and Littlemore’s brother Sam (who joined in 2016) could write. Taking its name from a herbal DMT mixture that you smoke, Changa is an appropriately colorful listen: “Chameleon” is a sonic explosion of joy, “Young Melody” (featuring Australian singer Vera Blue) harkens back to the old-school deep house of Sambanova, “Please Forgive Me” bounces on a rave piano riff, while “Into the Sky” takes a left turn into late-’80s/early-’90s Madchester dance, complete with appropriately lairy vocal from Littlemore. Changa is, in short, an eccentric, exciting listen that summons PNAU’s past to create a record very much about the now and the future.

  • PNAU
    PNAU
    PNAU

    “There was the time before this record, and then there was life afterwards,” Nick Littlemore tells Apple Music. PNAU’s self-titled 2007 album changed everything for the Sydney electronic group. It piqued the interest of Elton John, who quickly signed PNAU to his management company and relocated them to London. “After we met Elton and we moved, something shot us into the stratosphere. That record was the precursor to this huge shift in our lives, and in terms of how we saw the world and our music.” It was a creatively fruitful time for Littlemore and Peter Mayes, who suddenly found themselves in a world of open doors and big-name collaborations. Shortly after, Littlemore also formed Empire of the Sun, a collaboration with Luke Steele, which helped them blow up even more. “It all just erupted in this great way,” he says. Their fame may have exploded overseas, but it all began within the sweaty rooms and close friendships of Sydney’s early- to mid-2000s club scene. “It was such a melting pot at the time. We were all congregating at these club nights, and it was the only time in our career where we could make records, play them, test little bits out. I feel like [PNAU] really was our twenties,” Littlemore says. “Like a mixtape of everything from those years.” Below, Littlemore talks through each track on PNAU. With You Forever “This was a really interesting song because it represented Luke and I coming back together. We’d cowritten a song on his first album and then lost touch for a long time. Peter and I had a rough version of the backing track. We sent it to Luke, who was going through all kinds of emotional issues at the time. This song was his way of catapulting himself back into a good, positive place. It just felt like such a good opener for the record. It felt like true disco. In some ways, disco is our roots—we came up through the French disco sound and learning about the roots of real dance music through Chicago and Detroit.” Wild Strawberries “This was from a completely different time in my life. I was living in England, at Darren Emerson from Underworld's house. He would go away on DJ tours all the time and I would have his studio. I put this together on Myspace with a guy from Paris. I sent him a couple of little samples, they put this backing track, I sang this crazy thing over and just forgot about it. It sat on my hard drive for about two years. Then when Sam [Littlemore, Nick’s brother and future PNAU member] came in and Peter started working on everything, they pulled out this big session with every idea we had, and it came up as this little belter.” Shock to My System “We were working with a band called Lost Valentinos. I wrote that song with Nik [Yiannikas] for the Valentinos record, but they thought it was too cheesy or whatever. It sounded really different, like a punk record. Then, when Sam and Peter pulled up that massive session, they made it into this really odd, mad electro thing.” Baby “I was back at my parents' house for a while, I guess I must've been skint. I just remember writing that really quickly. The idea was never to have me singing, we wanted it to be kids. It worked out. We were working with KLP, who teaches kids, and her dad has a recording studio. We went out west to his place and recorded all these kids. I think we went to the classroom and we took a reel-to-reel and I started dancing in front of all the kids. It was a mad one.” Come Together “I love the emotion of the chords in this. We worked with Michael Di Francesco, Touch Sensitive. He just is such a master with those chords. They’re uplifting, but they have this deepness to them. It entrances you in this really beautiful way.” We Have Tomorrow “‘We Have Tomorrow’ was an amalgamation of lots of little ideas. We were always playing gigs around, so we were always trying little bits. It's just loops and things we'd made on synths, that we collected and chucked into Ableton. We had hundreds and hundreds of these loops. Then Sam put his magic on it and really brought everything together with that beautiful melody.” Lover “This started out as an indie rock record. I don't know how it all came together exactly. I remember writing one part of it, but it was a whole different song. Then Sam and Pete put together this great backing track, and it happened to match when they were looking around for vocals. It's actually more like how we do things now, in COVID times, where everyone's separated. Some of these ideas were constructed in separate energies and then brought together.” No More Violence “This is a banger. This was written with Kim Moyes. He had a studio in this old building right in the center of the city, nowhere near anyone residential or any studios. It had incredible stairwells, all marble. It's a really expensive, beautiful building. He got it for free just through someone he knew. We recorded the backing in the stairwell. You can hear it in the track, this crazy reverb in there in bits. Then when we were working downtown in Redfern, where Pete's studio was, I found a royalty-free recordings thing online and got the idea of protest songs. I ended up writing a chant and getting loads of people to add their voices to make it huge. There were so many layers, but it’s really simple. In retrospect, I would have done more writing. There would have been more complex vocal arrangements. I always liked the idea that we were playing that, and occasionally you get more bro-y guys in the audience at some of the Big Day Out shows, where they get quite rough, but they're all chanting, ‘No more violence.’” Embrace “Concurrently while making this and living through the years of collecting these ideas, I was in Teenager with Pip [Brown], who became Ladyhawke, right around the time of this record. We were all bubbling away and doing things at the same time, and this record just came out of our great connection. I've always loved Pip. Her creativity has always been astounding to me. Her voice just cuts through me and makes me so emotional. I thought it was just because I knew her so well, but the more music you hear and the more you experience things, there's so few singers that can really cut it like that. ‘Embrace’ is such a testament to Ladyhawke and to Pip. She's such a superstar. She's just not celebrated enough.” Dancing on the Water “This was a weird one. I don't know how exactly it came together. It would’ve been just one of those weird demos that turn into something, into something, into something. Some of these songs, you look at the Pro Tools file and it’s No. 637 or something. It was in the spirit of all those things we were going for. It’s pre-MGMT and Empire and that kind of sound, but in a way we were probably trying to reach for that, but with a mad 303 line.” Freedom “‘Freedom’ was during the writing of the Empire record. We wrote it in about 20 minutes. Luke was flying back and forth—he was living in Perth at the time, but he'd come in every couple of weeks and we’d just get him in for the evening. It’s just this cool, deep-house, off-the-cuff thing. When I think about it now, the vocals were so rudimentary, but really that captured the spirit of what we were living at the time. It's weird because I think it's a really infectious dance groove, but in a way the vocal completely takes you out of the moment, so you lose your step with beat, but it still has something really great about it.” Die With Us “I started this again with Touch Sensitive. I had a little studio right on the corner of Kings Cross, diagonally opposite the Coke sign. I had everything synced up with an old sampler and all these early-’80s digital units, and it just came together. We played a few things and edited it all on machines rather than using computers, and I took some parts and played them through an aircraft hangar because my brother James was shooting a video there. We were in a huge, enormous hall. The reverb is true reverb in the sense that it's a real room, and it is fucking endless on some of those big chords. It led me to start my other project, Two Leaves, which was all just trying to make ambient, more filmic, noncommercial music.”

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About PNAU

PNAU are a highly decorated, fiercely celebrated Australian electro-pop trio who count Sir Elton John as their biggest fan. • The group was originally a duo featuring Peter Mayes and Nick Littlemore. The latter is also known for his work in the synth-pop group Empire of the Sun, which he cofounded in 2007. Nick’s brother Sam joined PNAU in 2016. • PNAU’s 1999 debut album, Sambanova, was an instant hit, though it was pulled from shelves due to uncleared samples and released with a different tracklist. • Sir Elton John signed the band after hearing their 2007 self-titled third LP, which he called the best thing he’d heard in a decade. Sir Elton mentored the group and collaborated with them on 2012’s Good Morning to the Night, a collection of songs built from samples of his early material. The album reached No. 1 in the UK. • In 2013, the French electronic duo Faul & Wad Ad sampled PNAU’s 2008 single “Baby” for their hit “Changes,” which charted in 25 countries.

ORIGIN
Sydney, Australia
FORMED
1999
GENRE
Dance

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