Bright lights, damp smells, electronic sounds bouncing from the walls. For Generation X, video game arcades were the gateway to dance parties.
PNAU made the leap. And somehow, that trip is fused into AHHCade, the electronic duo’s seventh studio album, out today (July 31) via Sydney-based indie label etcetc, part of TMRW Music.
“We started out this record trying to do something different and trying to make darker music,” co-founder Nick Littlemore explains in a sitdown chat with Billboard. “We talked about the idea of making it quite industrial, going back to my roots.”
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That didn’t quite end up happening.
Instead, PNAU, the project of high school buddies Littlemore and Peter Mayes, reached deep into the memory banks, and those formative, dingy rooms that sucked up our pocket money and triggered dopamine dumps.
“Arcades were such an exciting place as kids. I don’t know if they were safe spaces, but they were exciting and they gave us a window to a future that other generations didn’t have,” Littlemore explains. In an earlier, simpler life, the young generation was “going to the arcades, making mixtapes for friends, representing yourself on your pencil case.”
Playing the “Spacies,” as Aussies of a certain vintage have in their vernacular, “the fact they weren’t necessarily that safe is a bit like going to raves. They were the precursor to going into other dark rooms, with dodgy foods being sold somewhere. And blinking lights, mad sounds. And very electronic. You were interfacing with it.”
Those sensory overload rooms were the first to enable youngsters to get a buzz by burying their faces in screens. “Music isn’t work; you don’t work music. Arcades, it’s a play time, isn’t it?,” Littlemore reckons. “There’s a playfulness to it.”
Playtime was “naive back then in a beautiful way. I never want to lose that.”
The new collection houses the previously-released belter “Tu Corazon (Your Heart)” featuring Mexican rock act The Warning; the bubbly single “Nirvana” with EARTHGANG and sadMONTH; and the new single “Serotonin,” which features Kurtis Wells and arrives today. Other features include Master Peace, Kungs, MEDUZA, Maleigh Zan, The Flints, LATASHA, and Marieme.
PNAU formed in Sydney in the mid-1990s, the golden era of Australia’s underground electronic music scene. Their debut album, Sambanova, dropped in 1999, and won an ARIA Award for best dance release. More would come, as would AIR Awards. Long-overdue international recognition came when PNAU joined forces with Elton John on the Rocket Man’s 2012 remix album Good Morning to the Night, which went to No. 1 on the Official U.K. Albums Chart. PNAU and Elton teamed up again for the 2021 remix “Cold Heart” with Dua Lipa, and landed a bonafide global monster.
PNAU will support the new release with a national tour, kicking off Sept. 19 for Brisbane’s Night at the Parkland event. Littlemore, one half of Empire of the Sun, is a reluctant touring artist. “I want to wind up my personal touring by the end of the year. Ideally. I tried to do it last year. But I would like to move just purely into production and composition,” he insists. “I’ve been making a classical album, with an amazing arranger, and all these modular synths. Oh, my God. No one’s gonna listen to her, but I’m really enjoying making it.”
Littlemore admits he and Mayes and have “100s of songs and ideas” on standby. “Songs are spells. They’re wishes and they’re spells, and you want to put good spells in the universe,” he insists. “There are enough bad spells out there, anyway.”
AHHCade brings some balance to the equation. Eleven good spells, a half-hour playtime.
Stream it in full below.
