Within the ranks of Australian dance music, Pnau has always gone for the big swing. The duo-turned-trio – formed by Nick Littlemore and Peter Mayes in the mid-1990s, and joined by Nick’s brother Sam in 2016 – is unconcerned with looking cool, reliably choosing ostentatious production flourishes and bold, brassy vocal performances. Their sixth album, titled – fittingly – Hyperbolic, happily cranks the dial even further.
Pnau’s journey to this point has taken several turns, long before their remix of Elton John and Dua Lipa’s Cold Heart became a surprise late-career hit in 2021. Their 1999 breakout album, the deep and jazzy Sambanova, was yanked from stores due to uncleared samples, then rereleased in edited form. Closer to Groove Armada or a lounge house compilation than the speedy trance the pair bonded over as teenagers, Sambanova won the Aria award for best dance release in 2000 (improbably beating Madison Avenue’s Don’t Call Me Baby) and gave the bedroom producers a career.
Three years later, Pnau swerved with the darker, spikier and largely overlooked Again, which holds up remarkably today. (In the wilderness years that followed the album, I recall a sparsely attended Pnau show in Sydney with Littlemore conspicuously missing a front tooth from a drunken scuffle.) With 2007’s self-titled album, Pnau rode the electro-house zeitgeist (think Justice, Ed Banger and the reign of Modular Records) to much bigger stages, which they filled with dancing strawberries and occasional trapeze work.
Along the way, Pnau connected with none other than Elton John, who rhapsodised about the group’s self-titled album (and suggested to Littlemore that he fix that tooth). Their unlikely creative partnership included the 2012 remix album, Good Morning to the Night, and, of course, the Cold Heart remix – which remains Pnau’s biggest track to date. While the billions of streams didn’t exactly make Pnau a household name, Cold Heart set the stage for a comeback album that sees the group go all in on dance-pop.
On the other side of virality and more than six years since its predecessor Changa, what’s immediately obvious about Hyperbolic is that it’s prefabbed for the Spotify age, with six of its 10 songs previously released, leaving just four for fans to discover anew. It’s not so much an album with a deeply considered build, but rather a neat container for playlistable songs.
AEIOU, featuring Empire of the Sun (Nick Littlemore’s other band), opens proceedings with almost comical bombast, complete with a blast of nonsense lyrics (according to Littlemore, the idea for “a vowel-based song” has been percolating for a while). This leads breathlessly into The Hard Way, featuring the US R&B artist Khalid, a supremely polished synth-pop single with traces of American Idol.
Of the already released songs, You Know What I Need, featuring reliably silky vocals from man-of-the-moment Troye Sivan, is the runaway standout – although its sleek, streamlined production is absent of Pnau’s usual quirks. Stars, featuring David Guetta collaborators Bebe Rexha and Ozuna, is the most calculated post-Cold Heart pitch at hit-making, complete with a gaudy AI-generated music video. Meanwhile, River – released over three years ago and featuring longtime Pnau associate Ladyhawke – is perhaps the purest expression of the trio’s talents, with its elastic bassline, gleaming melody and powerfully delivered vocals in perfect calibration.
The four new songs offer the full spectrum of present-day Pnau. While Passion Flower and So High (the latter featuring Warnindhilyagwa woman Emily Wurramara) share a breezy pop feel, Nostalgia takes its cues from 90s trance and all-night warehouse raves, while still coming in under three minutes.
The album’s would-be anthem, though, is All the Time, co-written and sung by pop songwriters Sarah Hudson and JHart with backing from a kids’ choir. “Don’t you wanna feel good/All the time?” an insistent and borderline maniacal chorus chants over big house keys, handclaps and a whistled hook that could one day be a TV jingle. This far into a twisty dance career and with no plans to settle into elder statesmen status, Pnau just wants to feel good all the time – subtlety be damned.
Hyperbolic by Pnau is out now via Etcetc
