After more than a decade of trying to outrun their own success, Adam Hyde and Reuben Styles took back control and made the kind of debut album only Peking Duk could.
The best thing that could have happened to Peking Duk was a blessing in disguise: a few of their songs failed to go double platinum. After “High”, “Take Me Over”, “Stranger”, “Fake Magic”, and the rest of an absurdly hot streak, Adam Hyde and Reuben Styles began to feel that every new song had to protect what the last one achieved.
“You don’t want to end that hot streak,” Styles says. “You’re like, ‘Well, we’re doing great at this, so let’s try and maintain this.’”
Finally, a small streak of songs came that, for one reason or another, did not meet the benchmark.
“One of the most fortunate things we came across was a small run of songs that didn’t hit double platinum,” he says. “So then we could go, ‘Cool, let’s just reset absolutely everything. Let’s wrap up chapter one,’ as we announced dramatically on social media, ‘and begin chapter two.’”
Chapter two is Paradise, Peking Duk’s debut album, out today.
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It comes more than a decade after the two Canberra teenagers began making electronic music together, but only after they stopped treating each release as a metric of their success. The duo have described reaching a point of “intimate fearlessness” with one another. For Styles, that began with reclaiming control.
“One would be really taking back the keys to our whip, which was previously a little bit influenced by management and label,” he says. “We’ve since gone fully fresh on all fronts. I think what that did, in turn, was give us this whole new perspective of, ‘Okay, well, we don’t have to get green lights from anyone for anything we do right now.’”
Their creative lives outside Peking Duk — Hyde through Keli Holiday, Styles through Y.O.G.A. — also relieved pressure from the core.
“Knowing how comfortable we are with our own things that we’re doing on the side has just made it really fun to accentuate each other’s best traits, as opposed to compete,” Styles says.
The reset was not purely professional. Somewhere along the way, Hyde and Styles found themselves beside a lake, taking mushrooms and listening to music together without pressure to turn it into anything useful.
“I think that was prominent when Peking Duk first started and it’s part of who we are — people who just love sharing music and love discovering music,” Styles says.
It almost sounds like a Peking Duk creation myth, but the important part is not the mushrooms. After years of deadlines and expectations, they remembered how it felt to be curious and explore without a destination.
Realistically, the competition had never really been with other artists. Styles and Hyde admit they were competing with Peking Duk: the hit-making, festival-conquering titan of their own creation that audiences, industry, and perhaps the pair themselves had come to expect.
“It was consistently comparing ourselves to ourselves in this bizarre way,” Hyde says. “We were definitely conditioned to think the roadblocks were the norm for our ideas that we’d put forward. We were kind of stuck in this machine that we’d built, and before we knew it, we were kind of a slave to that machine. Not in a ‘woe is us’ way, but more so just, ‘This is how it goes.’”
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Breaking out meant dismantling the singles machine. On Paradise, they could make a body of work without demanding that every idea behave like a Peking Duk single. “There is no competition because it’s not about competition, it’s just creating shit,” Hyde says. “It’s not brain surgery, it’s just making beats.” (That is classic Hyde: sincerity rarely arrives without a punchline or a filthy analogy following close behind.)
Take “Forget Your Life”, one of the songs that established Paradise’s more lawless possibilities early in the album-writing process. “If you are on a bender with 12 pirates in a caravan and then you tried to write a pop song, I think that’s kind of what would come out,” Hyde says. “It’s like a futuristic, drunken shanty pop song.”
It’s not the sort of track that would have been sent confidently into the world via the old singles model. On an album, however, it has the space to be exactly what it is. Hyde loves its immediacy. “I love a song that doesn’t need foreplay, just get straight to fucking.”
Styles places “Forget Your Life” and “Can’t Fit In” in the same world. “You could almost be, I don’t know, floating on a doughnut off the back of the boat with 30 other people,” he laughs.
Both were among the first songs made. Then Peking Duk disappeared into robotic synthesisers. Half the album became synth-driven, while the other half leaned into samples and fantastical textures. For a time, they considered splitting the material into two albums. Instead, they realised the contrast held together.
“It is a sci-fi and fantasy spectacle in a weird way,” Styles says, citing Studio Ghibli’s Laputa: Castle in the Sky. “That’s some futuristic shit, but it feels like a fantasy film.”
The dirty fidget house and electro that first connected them remains, with Daft Punk, Basement Jaxx, the Prodigy, Gorillaz, rock and rap also in the bloodstream.
“Famous” returns to the French electronic music they loved as teenagers; elsewhere, Paradise becomes soft, cinematic, and almost weightless. Their younger selves would recognise the ingredients. Styles doubts they would believe that they were capable of putting them together.
“It felt like we were kids again out the back of Adam’s house, where we’d built this makeshift studio in his gazebo-ish fucking room out the back of his mum’s house,” he says. “No idea what we were doing, but just having the most fun time doing it.”
Longtime collaborator Styalz Fuego helped preserve that discovery through three years of dismantling and rebuilding songs. “Styalz is just the sun and the moon,” Hyde says. “He is everything. He’s a brother; he’s the third member of Peking Duk.”
“Big Duk,” Styles nods sagely.
Hyde describes Fuego as a coach who refuses to let them become complacent and is willing to tell them when an idea is not working. “He calls a spade a spade, and that’s one of his best traits. You can’t sugarcoat when you’re trying to make something good. We all have the same compass, I guess, the same magnet of taste.”
That compass also guided an eclectic cast of collaborators, including Rico Nasty, Killer Mike, Matt Corby, Royal & the Serpent, and Phantogram. Often, a guest was put before a live microphone without properly hearing the instrumental, with instinct prized over polish. This happened on many takes, including lead single “Thrills”.
“The first ideas people have — and especially with people like Shungudzo, anytime an idea jumps into her head — it’s literally out of this world,” Styles says. “They brought chaos and magic and all the things we were looking for.”
“Let Go”, featuring Corby, sounds like one of the album’s most exposed moments, with soft piano, negative space, and that unmistakable velvet falsetto. Hyde resists the idea that it’s more vulnerable than some of Peking Duk’s earlier work. “It’s actually the opposite of vulnerable,” he says. “It’s kind of just saying, ‘Let go. Move forward.’ It’s very positive in that sense.”
Styles then reveals that, until only weeks before the album was finished, the song had no proper lyrics. “It was gibberish. We were like, ‘Shit, we probably have to put some words on this thing.’ I was also happy for it to come out with gibberish.”
That interplay is the record in miniature: emotional openness without solemnity, and meticulous production disguised as two mates playing around and figuring things out on the fly.
Paradise is a love letter to Australia, but not the manicured Australia sold back to the world on postcards. Its everyday poetry is personal and slightly skewed: a lake, a backyard room, a caravan full of pirates, a piano part that begins as noodling, a dancefloor where everyone looks feral and feels magnificent.
That idea becomes clearest when Hyde talks about touring. Peking Duk will soon take Paradise around Australia with a new live show, with tickets on sale now. The tour is where the album’s purpose becomes tangible.
“I think joy is the best thing in the world,” Hyde says. “We’ve somehow created this vessel that can carry joy from town to town, or ear to ear, heart to heart, through the music.”
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He describes the exchange in physical terms: people “dancing with their shirts off and sweating and smiling and crying and hugging”. The energy goes out and comes back, and the older he gets, the more extraordinary that seems.
For years, Peking Duk believed the task was to maintain the streak. Paradise began when they realised the streak was not the point.
“It would’ve been nice to be able to tell 2014 us that it doesn’t matter,” Styles says. “Just have a fucking fun time making music.”
Peking Duk’s Paradise is out now. Ticket information for their Australian tour can be found here.
Jade Kennedy is a journalist, photographer, and publicist based in Queensland, with over 20 years’ experience in the Australian music industry.
