Photos by Ned Simes / Interview by Amar Gera //
One of the funnest chats we’ve had in the LWA office…
The feeling of seeing Canberra-originating duo Peking Duk (made up of Adam Hyde and Reuben Styles) live is one that’s pretty damn easy to describe. It’s fun, emotional, cathartic and most importantly, uplifting. The energy their musical catalogue is infused with is totally pure and euphoric, and when combined with an off chops crowd, the two best mates in the flesh and an ungodly amount of bass, well, it’s fucking incredible. And after bringing that energy across the nation and in New Zealand over the past couple of months, Sydneysiders are finally going to get their turn, the Duks bringing their insane live show to Winter In The Domain next month (cop tickets here).
Their latest release ‘Chemicals’ sees the boys continue to hone in on their unique brand of festival bangers, the type where you hold your mates close and sing at the top of your lungs as you make the most of the time you have left in those holy mosh pits. Featuring singer-songwriter and longtime Peking Duk collaborator Sarah Aarons, the tune sees the trio get deep on the theme of abusive relationships, exploring the different types of vices we have and how they can bring about our downfall.
We caught up with the duo for a fun photoshoot and chat about the new tune in the LWA office (while sipping on some delicious immunity juices with a tonne of ginger in them).
Check it below.
Congrats on the new track. It seems like you guys have really nailed down your sound over the years. Every time you experiment to take a left turn, it’s pretty easy to get into. Has that been something you’ve been trying to develop over time? Or has that been a natural progression?
Adam: First of all, thank you for the love on the new tune. I’d say every song we write is different and every time we go to the studio, we come out with something different. We never really go into something going, “This will be the end goal.” Wherever it ends up is where we play it from there.
Reuben: There was a time where we were planning things a little bit and we were trying to write with results in the back of our mind. And after a while, we realized that that’s the worst mentality to go into the studio with, because you’re setting yourself up for failure straight away. Eventually we started falling in love with just going to the studio and making songs without a plan. And that’s when the songs really started to take those unexpected twists and turns, but then still have those classic Duk moments in it.
That reminds me of that triple j video Linda Marigliano did about making a hit. And the first thing you guys said when they asked you about what makes a good hit was “You tell us.”
Adam: If you look at most giant hit songs and you watch it or read an interview with their producers or the songwriters or the singer, 95% of the time, they’re like, “We had no idea that it would catch on this way.” Because that’s where the magic is made is in the unknowing, and the voodoo of it is in the fact that you’re not trying to write a hit. You know what I mean? You’re literally pissing in the dark in the wind, and that’s a hard thing to do. You don’t know what’s going to happen.
Adam: Yeah, but who knows? Those lights come on and you’re pissing in the toilet. And you’ve killed it.
Were you like that with ‘Fake Magic’ or ‘High’?
Adam: With ‘High’ we definitely had no idea. That was originally 128 BPM. Then by mistake it was slowed down and just took on a life of its own. And that, I guess, paved a new path for us.
Reuben: Yeah. Big time.
In terms of the tracks you’ve dropped this year, you’ve definitely been bouncing between moods and so on. From balladry to more fast-paced, double-time type vibes. How does tempo fit into that?
Reuben: We don’t really think in tempo as much as we used to. After ‘High,’ obviously there were a lot of things in the back of our minds saying we should probably do another song around 100 BPM and have that same sort of feel. But only two songs after ‘High’ we did ‘Say My Name,’ which was like 85 BPM or something like that.
Adam: And it was a rock song.
Reuben: And it was a rock song. And then that song actually ended up getting added to a bunch of rock stations around the US, and it’s probably done the best out of any song of ours in the US to this day. And so our label at the time was like, “Yeah, y’all should keep this rock thing going.” And we were like, “Oh yeah, no, we just do dance music. We didn’t really plan on this.” But yeah, no, there was definitely a bit of a thought to tempo after ‘High’. And then following ‘Say My Name,’ we did ‘Stranger,’ which was at that same tempo.
Reuben: But at the end of the day, that has a very classic Peking Duk sound where it’s like wall of sound in a sense, heavily side-chained, and those big XL size drops.
Adam: A big lead.
Reuben: With a big lead from a vocal chop or sample or something like that.
Reuben: We’re not really ever trying to do that for every song. It does happen here and there, and it just feels right because it might sound like Peking Duk. But I think we’ve accidentally been doing every second song as something totally different. ‘Fake Magic,’ ‘Say My Name,’ ‘Wasted,’ ‘Ur Eyez,’ ‘Move’ don’t have that same signature Duk sound, and ‘Lil Bit’ even. And now I guess we don’t have any plan of attack anymore. Things are just happening and we’re getting into the studio and just having a fun time.
Is that how you go about choosing collaborations as well? For the recent singles you’ve had The Wombats, Tommy Trash, Alisa Xayalith and no Sarah Aarons on this new track. How does the process of collaborating come about?
Adam: With collaborations, it’s more like most of the time we’ve established relationships with those people prior to actually working with them. We’ve had beers with them or just met them out or whatever it might be. But with Sarah, I did a session at the Sony Studios in Sydney with her.
Reuben: That was in 2014 or something.
Adam: That was years and years and years ago. And then we did ‘Fire’ together. Then she was down to do another session.
Reuben: And when we met Sarah in LA and wrote ‘Fire’ with her, it was a pretty special day. We met our icon that day. I don’t know if you’ve heard of Tim and Eric, but Tim Heidecker from Tim and Eric was eating pizza at the joint next door to the studio. Check out Tim Heidecker. He’s fucking hilarious.
Reuben: And so she had a good omen about her. Also, not only did we meet Tim Heidecker, we got to release ‘Fire,’ which is to this day, one of our most successful songs. And the thought of getting in the studio with her again for a session was like, “Well, fuck, of course. Absolutely.”
Adam: Yeah. But with collaborations, it’s always different. With Aluna, she’s a homie, and we’re good friends, but we didn’t know her prior. We kind of reached out and said, “Hey, would you be down to jump on this?” And luckily she was. Sometimes it’s you just randomly get teed up in a session. Or you just meet them while you’re out
Reuben: In Sweden, we were at a party at Northbound Studios in Stockholm, and there were some crazy people at this party. I think Akon was there.
Adam: Akon was there!
Was he talking about Akon City?
Adam: That would have been pre-Akon city [laughs]
(Cue our beast photographer Ned bringing in a bunch of juices from up the road with an insane amount of ginger in them).
Adam: Where were we? Oh yeah, we were in Stockholm and then at this party at Northbound Studios, and then we just wandered around and Icona Pop were working in one room, and they knew that we’d done a song with Elliphant. And we were like, “Hey guys.” And they were like, “Oh, come check out what we’re working on.” And we were like, “Yo, we should do a song one day.” So we got to do ‘Let You Down’ with them, as a song that came out pretty much a few months after we met them. And so some of them just come around,
Adam: Sometimes it just happens. But yeah, it’s always different man. Every time it’s different. And yeah, it could be through a chance meeting, like Reuben said, or it could be produced via a conversation through our labels management. But at the end of the day, we’ve only ever worked with people that we fuck with. And I think like that’s a really important thing is having that kinship, that friendship, you can vibe with each other on an actual personal level, as opposed to just a music level.
I feel like that leads really well into the subject matter of the tune, being about abusive relationships and vices. What was that writing process like in the studio? Was it more one person sort of telling their story and everyone following it? Or was it something you guys all collaborated on?
Adam: That day Reuben was on the keys playing some chords, and I had a drum loop playing and Sarah was-
Reuben: We’ve got a little bit of a thing where we’d try to agree on a tempo. And that makes it quite easy for us to both get in our zone for a bit and then I’ll send shit over to him and he’ll send shit over to me.
Adam: Yeah, it’s good. It’s a good process that we have now.
Reuben: And if we stay in that tempo, then it’s really easy to keep sending each other shit, and let it keep evolving and progressing. And then yeah, it’ll get to a point where we can send one of the laptops through speakers, and then that’s when Sarah would straightaway just start going ham. She just starts straightaway and –
Adam: She’s got a notebook and she just goes crazy. And she writes melodies, lyrics, everything at the same time. And she came up with the theme of it all and we proposed a few suggestions like “Hey, maybe flip this word, change that melody there” And she’s like, “Yep, yep, boom, boom, boom.”
Reuben: And she would just try it straightaway, and be like, “Yep. Got it. Cool. We can move on.” And then she’ll try it. And sometimes she’ll be like, “No, it’s better like this.” It’s just so fast. And it’s a good way to write, because you never get hung up on something being like, “Oh, but this has been there for hours now.” It’s just like, nothing’s more than 15 to 30 minutes old.
Adam: So you’re not attached to it.
Reuben: You’re not attached to anything at all.
Adam: It’s like Las Vegas.
Reuben: It makes it really easy, yeah. Just to be ruthless with any idea that feels even like a nine out of 10 in your head. You can just be like, “Why is it nine? Let’s make it better. Bam.”
Adam: Let’s make it 11.
Do you have more plans to do those sort of collaborations with similar artists? Anyone you’re itching to get in the studio with?
Adam: Totally, man. We’re always just fucking down to jam. And that’s what we’ve been doing. We just get in a room with people and make some shit and see what comes out of it. And a lot of the time, it’s an amazing experience and there’s an amazing song afterwards that we can listen to that didn’t exist prior. And I think that’s the most important thing is realizing that it’s just creating shit. It’s making shit and it’s fun.
Reuben: And it’s never about planning too much. It’s always just like, “Let’s just get in there and have fun.” And as Adam said, it’s making something from nothing. Whether it sees the light of day or it doesn’t, it’s still beautiful to have.
Adam: It’s a beautiful process. And it’s a pretty fucking crazy thing to think about, creating songs or creating anything at all. It’s quite a fascinating ritual in a way. It’s been going on for years and years, of just making things out of nothing. Sometimes after you’ve made a song, you sit there and you go, “Fuck, that didn’t exist this morning. Now it’s something that I’m infatuated with, something that I can’t stop thinking about, something I don’t want to stop thinking about.” That’s like voodoo shit, you know?
Reuben: And sometimes songs get a bit personal and you kind of want them to just be yours. You don’t want to release it because it’s almost too personal. And it’s like, they’re almost even better creations because they’re just for you and your friends. And it’s kind of nice.
Are there a lot of songs like that in your back catalog or even the side projects where it’s like “Fuck, I gotta keep this for myself.”
Reuben: Absolutely. There are so many… I guess we’ve both gone through a lot. We both have friends that have passed and things like that. And there are songs that we’ve written that would be really hard to share with other people. And I think it’s a really nice creative outlet and a good way to deal with things as well.
Just going back to the song and single art. It’s very surreal and psychedelic. Was that the vibe you were going for? That voodoo shit.
Adam: I think the actual characters made by Ollie, the little cherubs that are in the artwork, they’re little cherub versions of Reuben and myself. And then there’s a little duck.
Reuben: We’re sitting in a portobello. We have fun guys. We love mushrooms.
Adam: We love mushrooms. Yeah, mushrooms are great.
Reuben: Shiitakes. Or oyster mushrooms. Swiss Browns.
Adam: They’re great. But yeah, it’s kind of like these characters going on a journey. And that’s going to be the theme throughout our next string of releases, is that visual aesthetic of these characters going on a wild adventure, a wild journey. Their first stop was technically on a whale for a little bit, but after their second stop, after they got off the whale, now they’re in a mushroom land. And who wouldn’t want to live in a mushroom land because mushrooms are fan-fucking-tastic.
Reuben: They are.
View this post on Instagram
Just talking about that journey, it sounds very clear-cut and like you’ve got it quite conceptualised. Did that come quite recently or has that been a while in the making?
Adam: For a while we were just dropping songs, and then we were like, “Shit. What should we make the artwork?” We didn’t think about it too much. But I think it hit a point where we were like “Well, maybe aesthetically we should go next chapter kind of thing.” And this is the start of that next chapter.
Reuben: So we just sort of thought of things that we’d both really like, and we both agree on a lot, so it was pretty easy to come together on it.
Adam: And Oliver Main is an incredible artist that really took that shit to the next level.
Reuben: We saw a little bit in a couple of things he mocked up, and we were like, “There’s a little bit Studio Ghibli in there, little bit of Fantasia, a little bit of psychedelic.” And it was like all these boxes are being ticked in a great way.
View this post on Instagram
Listening to ‘Chemicals,’ I get this mental image of the last song of a closing festival set, everyone clapping, on shoulders singing, the whole lot. Is that sort of in the back of your mind when writing tunes? You seem to have mastered those types of festival bangers.
Adam: I guess that would come into play with anything we write in a way, because that is what we do out in the field. You know what I mean? That’s kind of what we do when we play those gigs, we bring maximal energy and make sure it’s a fucking big party. So I think in the back of our heads at all times, we’re kind of like, “Oh, how can we bring that element into it?” You know what I mean? And that’s definitely in ‘Chemicals.’ It’s in a lot of music that we have coming up as well. I think it’s an important part of Peking Duk, is that, for sure. Togetherness and it’s melancholic, it’s euphoric, it’s fucking fun. You can cry to it. You can cry-dance to it, dancing and crying.
Reuben: You can listen to it loud. You can listen to it soft.
Adam: You can listen to it hard. You can listen to it soft.
Reuben: There’s something else coming.
Adam: Mate, it’s happening right now. Got to get to the studio.
Reuben: The cogs are turning!
Speaking of different sounds, you both have your own side projects that are very contrasting in a sonic sense. How do those side projects feed into Peking Duk and your newer releases as a duo?
Reuben: Yeah, well like Peking Duk was there first and foremost, like 10 years before either of the side projects. And so just Peking Duk has always been our number one everything. And it was great. Then this one moment I got an email from Adam saying “Reubie Doobie, I’m keen to put out a few songs, as a solo thing.” And he sent through a link with a couple of songs, and I was like, “Holy shit, this is so exciting.” We’ve been going to the studio for years together doing Duk songs, and I think after a while, it sort of got to a point where it’s like, “All right, we’ve got the next sort of 10 songs ready to go, mixed and mastered.” And then in 2018 we did things like wrote a kid’s book, opened a bar.
Reuben: We got very extracurricular, because it was hard to walk up to the studio, knowing that you just already had so much finished, ready to go. And it was like, all right, it was the biggest motivator in the world to just finally get to make music for no reason again, make music for yourself again, and make music for another platform for these side projects. And then it really ultimately made making Duk songs more fun again.
Reuben: And now we have so much fun, rocking up and doing Duk songs. Because we’ve been in the studio doing so many other things and we get to get little bits and techniques that we’ve been newly acquiring because of a result of the side projects. And now we’re having the best time ever.
Is it sort of like recapturing that initial spark before music became a job?
Reuben: Fully. Now, when we’re in the studio it’s like us in 2010 in Adam’s back gondola. Just two kids, with no idea what the fuck we’re doing. No plan, just getting in there and having fun making the songs.
What’s that been like? Having that creative reset of sorts?
Reuben: Dude, it’s been so, so great. Adam and I have lived in separate cities for over three years now. And so there’s also a bit of that rekindling feeling as well, apart from just being able to get together and do Duk songs. It’s also, as mates, we get to hang out, get drinks together and do things. Because we’re spending so much time apart, it makes hanging out together, and whether we’re making music or not, it’s just like, everything’s really fun again and really exciting.
Adam: It’s refreshing. I think it’s also important to use other outlets in your mind, like with Y.O.G.A. or with Keli Holiday or with producing for other artists or writing with other people or any shit like that, it’s like jumping in a lagoon. It’s nice. It’s good for the soul. It’s good for the mind. It kind of cleanses you in a way. And then you can go back to doing whatever it is you normally do with a new perspective and a new vibe to it.
Adam: And I think without that, it would be different. Doing the same thing over and over is great, but it’s also cool to try some new things here and there, and then with what you learn along the way, you bring that back to the tool shop that you initially are in. You know what I mean? Like if anything, it’s just more music, it’s more fun, it’s more creativity.
Reuben: And that’s it. That’s the best bit about it, is there are now all these music avenues, like you said, producing and everything that aren’t writing kids books and opening bars and shit like that. Everything’s still music, so that’s actually the best bit about it.
You guys are playing Winter in the Domain next month. How are you feeling coming back to Sydney? You’ve been playing around Australia and New Zealand, but it’s the first Sydney show in a while, right?
Adam: Dude, we’re pumped. It’s going to be sick. I think it’s also a celebration of shit kind of getting somewhat back to normal, whatever normal is. There is no normal now.
But I think people are ready to celebrate and get together and have a good time. And some of the gigs we’ve been lucky enough to play recently, you can see it in the crowd’s eyes. Literally everyone’s just hyped that they can be there with their friends, celebrating, just being out and about, let alone with live music. So for us to be able to be the people that can actually perform for people that want to have that good time and that want to come see Peking Duk, especially when we’ve got a whole new show to give to them, it’s just a beautiful symbiotic relationship between…
Reuben: Adam’s favorite word.
Adam: It’s my favorite new word. I just wanted to get it in. It’s a beautiful thing between us and the people that want to come party. And that’s an important thing about Peking Duk and always has been since day one is we want to fucking party with the people as much as they want to party with us. So for this show, we’re going to bring that party tenfold.
Reuben: And Sydney has historically always been our number one city on Spotify listenership, our number one for ticket sales.
Adam: Got to love this city, mate.
Reuben: It’s pretty exciting to finally get to play here again for the first time in two years.
Adam: Sydney’s a fucking beautiful city. It’s a beautiful place on earth, so to be able to do a show of that scale in these times is fucking wild, so we’re going to make sure we dig deep and bring the goods for everyone.
Has there been a special moment like that? Has there been a moment throughout the shows you’ve played recently where something has really stuck out to you?
Adam: I think Darwin was a good example of that.
Reuben: Yeah, Darwin was crazy.
Reuben: Big Pineapple was amazing.
Reuben: Auckland two weeks ago was wild.
Reuben: They’re so weirdly receptive. You just look at them and it’s just like, bam! They are ready.
Adam: Yeah. The energy is high. But I don’t even know if high’s the right word. Yeah, you’re right. It’s like super receptive.
Reuben: The whole crowd is like “What? Is that what we’re doing? Okay!”
Adam: Everything’s reciprocated tenfold. If you’re like, “Yeah,” they’re like, “Yeah!” It’s sick. But yeah, everyone just comes to get out and about.
Reuben: “You guys are great.” “What the fuck!”
Adam: But that’s the thing about everyone being cooped up for so long now that things are opening again, people just want to be around people. I’ve done the whole quarantine thing twice now, and both times what I’ve noticed is that as soon as I get out of quarantine, I just want to be around people, which is very normal. I just want to be around people so much so that both times I’ve stayed up until like 11am the next day. But I’m constantly just going to different people, and just wanting to be around people. And I’m sure that’s what a lot of people in the world have felt like.
Reuben: We were actually in a house like 500 metres that way.
Adam: We were. After I got out of quarantine. But yeah, it’s just exciting to be able to put on a party for people that have been deprived of such a thing for a long time is a true fucking privilege and a blessing.
View this post on Instagram
Lastly, what’s on the cards for the rest of the year?
Adam: What is on the cards? More music. We got more tunes.
Reuben: Yeah. Heaps of tunes lined up, which is great. And we’ve just got a new rest-of-world partner with BMG. So now everything’s set and ready to go, to just go boom, boom, boom and actually start releasing frequently. And perhaps we’ll start maybe mapping out an album in the next couple of months. But there’s a lot of singles before that.
Peking Duk’s new single ‘Chemicals’ is out now. You can buy/stream it here. Be sure to cop tickets to their show at Winter In The Domain here. Check out the some more pics from our photoshoot with the boys below.
