Empire of the Sun

Steelemore, and a project that arrived fully costumed

Luke Steele and Nick Littlemore met in Sydney in 2000, introduced by an A&R executive. Steele was fronting The Sleepy Jackson out of Perth; Littlemore had Pnau. The pair wrote together for years under the working name Steelemore before the material hardened into something with its own mythology, and in 2007 that became Empire of the Sun.

What separated it from a side project was that the presentation arrived at the same time as the songs. Littlemore wrote and produced; Steele took on the emperor figure, the headwear, the face paint and the alien-court imagery that has framed every sleeve and every stage since. The aesthetic has drawn criticism along the way for cultural insensitivity in some of its borrowings, and the duo have been asked about it more than once.

A debut that kept coming back

Walking on a Dream was released in 2008. The title track came out on 30 August that year and reached number ten on the ARIA singles chart; the album went double platinum in Australia and gold in the United Kingdom. At the 2009 ARIA Awards the duo won seven, including Album of the Year, and they had placed fourth in the BBC's Sound of 2009 poll before any of it.

Then the record did something unusual: it grew after the fact. A 2016 Honda Civic advertisement put Walking on a Dream in front of an American audience that had largely missed it, and the song charted in the United States for the first time, reaching number 65 on the Hot 100 and topping Billboard's Dance Club Songs chart on 14 May 2016. It was also their first entry on Alternative Songs. The certifications reflect the long tail rather than the release week — fifteen times platinum in Australia for 1,050,000 units, five times platinum in Canada, double platinum in the United Kingdom for 1.2 million.

Ice on the Dune, Two Vines, and eight years of not finishing

Ice on the Dune followed in 2013 and Two Vines in 2016. Work on a fourth album began between late 2016 and early 2017, and then stopped. The duo announced a hiatus and spent most of a decade elsewhere: Littlemore rebuilt Pnau into a remix and production concern, while Steele returned to The Sleepy Jackson, made DREAMS with Daniel Johns and released solo material.

Two things they have since pointed to explain the silence. One was the pressure that follows a debut of that size — Littlemore has said the pair have carried tension because they have always wanted to make the greatest thing. The other was grief: a fan who had become close to them fell ill and died, which Steele has described plainly and which fed directly into several of the songs that eventually surfaced.

Recording resumed in April 2024. By Littlemore's own estimate, the sessions across those years produced as many as 1,200 songs to arrive at the twelve that were kept.

Ask That God

Ask That God came out on 26 July 2024 through EMI Music Australia and Capitol, produced by the duo with Peter Mayes. Changes led on 4 April 2024, followed by Music on the Radio on 17 May, Cherry Blossom on 21 June and The Feeling You Get on release day.

It reached number ten on the Australian albums chart, 19 in Scotland, 17 in Switzerland and 58 in Germany. In the United States it went to number four on Top Dance Albums and 26 on Top Album Sales. Metacritic aggregated five reviews at 82.

The critical line was broadly that the duo had stopped chasing and gone back to what the first two records did. AllMusic gave it four stars and called it both a return to form and a retrospective journey through their sonic evolution. Record Collector, also four stars, judged the songwriting the sharpest it has been, with newer influences adding bite. The Observer matched that rating; Clash was cooler at seven out of ten.

Where they stand, September 2026

The touring has comfortably outgrown the album. The Ask That God run began in October 2024 and has since sold more than 400,000 tickets worldwide, which makes it the largest thing the duo have done.

In March 2026 they announced Ask That God: Afterlife, framed as the closing instalment of the cycle — more than thirty North American headline dates from August to October 2026, opening at Red Rocks Amphitheatre in Morrison, Colorado on 11 August and finishing on 9 October at PH Live in Las Vegas, taking in Forest Hills Stadium in Queens and the Hollywood Bowl on the way. Polo & Pan and Midnight Generation support on every headline date. Steele's framing of it was that Afterlife feels like a tour of unknowns and possibilities, of new plateaus and fragile breakthroughs.

On 14 September 2026 six Australasian shows were added for February and March 2027: Spark Arena in Auckland on 19 February, Riverstage in Brisbane on 21 February, Afterpay Arena in Sydney on 25 February, the Sidney Myer Music Bowl in Melbourne on 27 February, Adelaide Entertainment Centre on 2 March and RAC Arena in Perth on 6 March. Frontier members got first access on 16 September and general sale opened on 18 September. The Auckland date is their first headline show in New Zealand, and the run is billed as the final live chapter of Ask That God with a rebuilt production. A fifth album is in progress behind all of it.

What happens on stage

Littlemore's contribution is on the records rather than in front of an audience. The touring group is Steele with Nicholas Semrad on keyboards and synth, Ian Ball on guitar and Olly Peacock on drums, plus two dancers in elaborate masks.

The Austin show at Moody Amphitheater on 14 May 2025 gives the clearest picture of the architecture: the set was built in five parts, each opening with a costume change, Steele appearing at one point in a kabuto helmet and war paint, with boulders and oversized inflatable props cued to the LED wall behind. Roi Turbo, a South African duo working in African disco and psychedelic funk, opened.

The Afterlife version is tighter and later. At the sold-out Red Rocks opener on 11 August 2026 the duo were on at 9.30pm and off at 11, nineteen songs, in front of roughly 10,000 people. Reviewers have tended to write about the choreography of it rather than the musicianship — one described a performance built so that every movement, costume change and pose reads as deliberate, and concluded that it is not a show that can simply be watched.