This article was taken from the July 2013 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by <span class="s1">subscribing online.
Emperor Steele and Lord Littlemore are on a quest -- and JJ Abrams has pledged his allegiance. "Things are less and less interesting in music these days," says Nick Littlemore, one half of Australian electropop pair Empire of the Sun. "People upload things before they're conceived. They want gratification, they want to tweet straight away, they want likes.
We want to hide something. And JJ has his own mystery box."
The band's latest album, Ice on the Dune, didn't start with a SoundCloud upload of a half-completed track, but with an extravagant three-minute video, created by Bad Robot, the studio run by JJ Abrams, the creator of Lost and director of the new Star Trek and Star Wars films. The trailer is a prelude to the main multimedia narrative, in which Lord Littlemore and Emperor Steele battle the King of Shadows in a psychedelic, post-apocalyptic future (with fabulous costumes).
In real life, Littlemore and bandmate Luke Steele worked with writers from Bad Robot to shape a narra<span class="s1">tive while they recorded the album. "There's a passion in us to tell stories," Littlemore says. "The record is finished but the story will continue to be developed. Bad Robot makes sure things all make sense." Which means Empire of the Sun is less a band, more a working production com<span class="s1">pany: "We have writers, characters, costume designers, set designers..." Littlemore intends to create a full-length movie, filmed in short instalments out of sequence, which will play out over their next two albums. "There will be more and more elements, but everything pulls back to the same story."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
