Setting the scene: how Flume burst out of Australia to conquer the world

Harley Streten looks disconcertingly relaxed as he ascends the stairs of his tour bus, the 24-year-old’s sun-kissed skin complemented by the bus’s tan upholstery and set off by a white baseball cap. Outside, members of the Flume crew labour industriously, doing what needs to be done before tonight’s sold-out show at London’s historic Roundhouse, but inside the enveloping neutral tones of the coach, all is golden. Nobody is more surprised about it than the man of the moment himself: “I was thinking to myself earlier, how come I’m so fucking relaxed?” he ponders, leaning back in his seat. In six hours he’s due on stage, the first gig since the finished version of his second album ‘Skin’ landed in the hands of his label earlier this week. Asked if that has something to do with the sudden attack of Zen, he nods. “I got the zip file of the record in my inbox, I put it into iTunes and was like, ‘Yes, it’s done’.” The relief spreads over his boyish features, palpable and potent.

It’s been four years since Flume blew up, but the aftershocks still resonate. His debut album, released on Australian independent Future Classic in 2012, was one of those organic hits that no panel presentation or PR strategy can magic into fruition. It marked him out as one of the last artists to slip through when the industry gatekeepers were out to lunch, working out how to monetise SoundCloud and music blogs while he was using both to get massive for free. How else to explain the success of an introverted kid from Australia, one whose languid sound grafted the alien textures and anti-structures of experimental hip hop onto – with a dextrous sleight of hand – melodic and accessible party pop? But however unlikely his breakthrough, the stats spoke for themselves: he went from being a nobody to industry hot property. Flume went gold in his home country, while he colonised the global pop and dance markets by translating his idiosyncratic vision into remixes for Lorde, Arcade Fire and Disclosure. Things, in short, got very weird. “If someone has success in music, their whole life gets completely flipped,” he reflects. “Not only physically, with touring, but mentally. You’re now important. Your status just goes up, and it changes your personality – it’s your life. It’s... awesome.” He laughs, perhaps a little stiffly.

Now things are about to flip out all over again. Streten is braced to deliver his hugely anticipated follow-up, ‘Skin’ – a record that, according to the law of second albums, didn’t come easy. “No kidding!” he exclaims. “I think it just psyches people out, it psyched me out,” he says, of the sudden pressure. Then there’s the massive tour that will see him criss-cross time zones like hotel lobbies, and while the unveiling of his new live show will have to wait until Coachella, tonight’s gig will be the first time his European fans will have heard the bulk of his new material. The lead single ‘Never Be Like You’ has already knocked Zayn Malik’s ‘Pillowtalk’ off the No 1 spot in Australia and won co-signs from Annie Mac, while another teaser, a piece of sub-zero hip hop, features red hot rapper Vince Staples. So, you know, the signs are good.

They’re especially good given that the whole thing started life as an experimental side-project. “It really has shocked me quite a lot,” he says, of how big Flume has become. Had things gone as expected, we would be talking about What So Not, the far more straight-forward house project that he founded with his friend Chris Emerson. Flume, by contrast, was for headphones. “It was very strange to see these beats – beats which I thought were really chilled – to see people dancing enthusiastically to them at festivals, while singing along – or attempting to,” he says of those early days.

Born in the picturesque but culturally stymied town of Northern Beaches in the suburbs of Sydney, Streten was always drawn to electronic music. As a youngster, his mother used to play him French new age boffins Deep Forest to get him to sleep at night: “I’d only sleep once it was done because I wanted to stay up and listen to it,” he remembers – and you only have to listen to ‘Skin’s flute-laden curtain raiser to appreciate how much of a psychological footprint this left. Years later, he would make the pilgrimage to the city with his friends every weekend to party to fidgit house, but like so many digital natives his real-life clubbing experience was foreshadowed by a largely online education courtesy of Napster and Kazaa. At the canonical end there was The Prodigy and Daft Punk; then the wild cards: obscure hardcore like DJ Hixxy, and Ministry of Sound trance compilations courtesy of his neighbour’s brother. “It struck a chord with me, the euphoric nature of it,” he says, then pauses. “I used to listen to some terrible music.”

None of his school friends shared his listening habits, which led to to some childish bullying. “I used to cop a bit of shit for it when I was at high school,” he recalls. “‘Techno Beats Harley’, they used to call me.” Despite the teasing, by the age of 12 he was producing his own beats in his bedroom with the help of some production software given away in a box of cereal. It supplanted his first musical love – the saxophone – and his teachers even allowed him to create beats for music class, so long as he played sax to them. However, after nine years’ study he eventually ditched the sax classes when its limitations became too obvious: “You can only play one note at a time and that’s just boring,” he says. It sounds funny, but he’s deadly serious.

Perhaps it’s telling that the saxophone requires a band to work, whereas Streten cuts a more singular figure. Giving his first interview of his first round of press for three years, he is polite, open, but you can tell he doesn’t relish talking about himself: “I was kinda quiet,” he agrees. “I think that’s why I’m in this position. I have all these [production] skills that I might not necessarily have had if I’d been hanging out with the cool crowd.” Yet watching him rehearse, flanked by swathes of lights, drum pads, keyboards and controllers, he seems incredibly at ease. It wasn’t always like this, of course. As a teenager Streten was restless, burning through a number of names and musical styles, from the electro house of his first project HEDS and Harley School Kid to moombahcore detours and the banging house of What So Not. We know this because he was an active and long-time user of Reddit, posting tracks for feedback that are still searchable today. But it was also there that Streten would comb the sub-reddit r/futurebeats – and the blogosphere in general – for music that would help crystallise the Flume sound, with one or two particular artists proving foundational. “I remember the first track I heard by [Flying Lotus], ‘GNG BNG’. My mind exploded,” he says. But there was another piece of dynamite even more potent: the cosmic pop enigma Jai Paul. “I was like, oh my God, what is this?” he says, referring to the Brit producer who remains a mysterious, totemic figure for blog readers of a certain age. “The rhythm and flow felt so right. ‘BTSD’ is basically what I based this entire Flume project on”. After school he spurned uni to thrash out a living making music, working a series of shitty jobs while he waited. He was working as a waiter at the Hard Rock Cafe when he finally caught a break, having entered a demo version of his ‘Sleepless’ EP into a competition run by Future Classic. “I came second,” he laughs. “But I got a deal out of it.”

On a working holiday in Australia in autumn 2012, Transgressive founder Toby L stumbled on an early club appearance from a nascent yet hugely exciting Streten off the back of the label’s excitement over the Sleepless 12”: “He changed the parameters of what underground electronic music could be. In a tiny room, it was evident that he was able to showcase both a unique production style, as well as memorable, forward-thinking songwriting. I was blown away. It was a no-brainer to get involved.” Approaching Future Classic the following day, a deal for UK and Europe was agreed over several drinks – and that was that.

It’s intriguing that when Flume came up, both at home and in the wider global musical landscape, he remained very much outside any musical trend or movement. Initially championed by big Australian broadcaster Triple J Radio, his music travelled quickly. The very fact that he came from Australia was a novelty – particularly in the US, a country not known for its cultural sensitivity. “They just think of Steve Irwin,” he laughs. “You can tell them anything, shit like ‘Yeah, I used to ride kangaroos as a kid’.” Perhaps more importantly, his sound has remained flexible enough to allow a shifting range of influences to percolate, without losing the distinct, melodic Flume fingerprint: he can be championed by rap blogs but be accessible and melodic enough to keep the EDM or pop mainstream onside. One fan at the Roundhouse gig perfectly sums up his music’s broad appeal: “You can play it any situation, whether you’re doing work, out in the club or chilling with friends. It just works.” Furthermore, where British producers like Evian Christ, who came up at a similar time and through similar internet channels, felt tethered to an online underground, Flume felt anomalous, autonomous. “I didn’t have a collective around me, I didn’t have a scene,” he reflects. We ask whether he felt he was responsible for creating a scene in his wake. “I feel like it did change the musical landscape, especially in Australia. I don’t want to sound like a douche, but I kind of think that happened, and I’m stoked.” There’s just one drawback to being a trailblazer – the amount of dodgy facsimiles. “A year or so ago, there was a lot of music that came out of Australia that sounded like me,” he says. Is he bothered? “On the one hand it’s really annoying: I’ll labour for years coming up for new concepts about how to do things, like, a conventional drop sounds like this, so I’m going to it like this,’” he explains. “Then I put a song out and I feel like I hear tons of rip-offs.” On the whole, though, he sees it as a positive force. “It means I can’t just settle and do my old techniques, I have to keep coming up with new stuff.”

If anything, Flume’s resolve to innovate is stronger than ever. There’s something curious about the Roundhouse gig; everything looks as you might expect: a sea of hip hop hands, Tumblr visuals, and girls in Reebok Classics perched on shoulders. With every blinding flash of light, hands shoot skywards, and Streten’s lithe figure atop the reflective geometric platform is caught in dramatic silhouette. But there’s a disconnect: the music frequently veers into mutant territory, shot through with exoskeleton flex or amorphous anti-gravity. Not all the time; there’s still plenty of hooks (this is Flume, after all) but they’re offset by uncompromising ideas. It is, he says, the manifestation of an impulse that has driven him since the beginning, and that until now has largely lain dormant: a desire to marry challenging sound design with pop nous.“I think I’ve got quite an unusual interest in the sense that I love pop music and I love experimental electronica,” he tells us. “Electronica’s where there are new sounds and textures, and that’s the only frontier in music that hasn’t been [fully] explored yet. When the electric guitar came in that was like ‘Holy crap!’. Now it’s been here for a while, and production is the new thing. You distort things, you can put things through plug-ins built by some Russian kid. Technology is taking us to a place where we can create sounds we couldn’t create twenty years ago.”

Indeed. Spend any amount of time with ‘Skin’ and it’s hard to ignore the influence of a new generation of genre outliers – and it’s unsurprising that he cites Sophie as his ideal collaboration right now. The PC Music affiliate’s ability to merge abrasive sonics with a brazenly mainstream flirtation is analogous to Flume’s, albeit Streten switches out the art school irony for quiet ambition. “I want the success of a mainstream artist,” he declares. “I don’t want to be playing the same sized venues, I want to grow and I want to bring what I do to a larger audience.”

Judging by the feverish response at the gig, his plan is working. Back on the tourbus, the subject turns, inevitably, to pop music. It’s interesting to note that when Flume arrived on the scene pop hadn’t yet awoken to the power of production mavericks, now megastars like Kanye West have fashioned a cottage industry out of employing underground talent like Evian Christ and Arca, while Sophie works with Charli XCX. Is that’s something he’s also interested in. “Oh hugely. I’m sick of writing music for me.” Above all, Streten seems hyped to be one of the architects of a golden era for electronic music, something he’s clearly longed for ever since he was a kid in his bedroom, listening in to weirdo transmissions from half the world away. “People are pushing things. Sometimes I used to be like, oh man, it’s going to be hard because there’s going to be so many kids that are going to be doing crazy shit,” He exhales a breath I’m not even sure he knew he was holding. “But it seems like everything’s going to be OK.”

‘Skin’ is out this month on Trangressive Records in Europe, Mom+Pop in North America and Future Classic everywhere else