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Returning after a huge debut album, laptop-hugging producer Flume is letting expectations drive him forward. Words: Will Richards. Photos: Emma Swann.
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hen Harley Streten released his debut, self-titled album at the end of 2012, it thrust him into a world he didn’t quite anticipate. Almost three years of constant touring followed, promoting a record that gathered unprecedented pace and success, written without a single expectation.
“I was writing whatever I wanted with little consideration,” he explains. “I just went with whatever came out, and it wasn’t very thought out.” Before beginning work on its muchanticipated follow-up ‘Skin’, the Sydney native took some time to adjust back to a life off the road before coming back with a new, more calculated approach. “I took some time off to live like a normal fucking human,” he remembers.
“I would take a few months back home here and there between tours to recuperate, and I feel much healthier as a person now because of that.” Things were always going to be different for the second age of Flume, with a ton of expectation falling on his shoulders, a lot of which was placed there by the man himself. “I had to put a certain amount of pressure on myself to create music of a certain level and a certain standard. Since the first record came out, there’s now a benchmark for me to hit and to beat.” The benchmark is indeed now set high for the follow-up to ‘Flume’, but it’s one that’s helped him grow and change. “[This album] was much more calculated - I really thought about who I wanted to work with, how I wanted it to sound, where I wanted to take the sound, and how I wanted it to differ
from my first album. I placed quite a lot of pressure on myself, and just wanted to get it right, so decided to take as long as I needed.” ‘Flume’ placed him into a particular box as a writer, one that he was keen to stretch and escape from with ‘Skin’. It’s a feeling which hit him before the tour for his debut finished. “[The success] grew and grew, and it got to the point where I didn’t want to carry on playing shows unless I had new material. I had a bunch of new songs, but I couldn’t play them because I was saving it for the record, and it was quite frustrating giving people the same show every night, when I had so much new stuff I was sat on.” The material written since his debut album stretches to over two albums’ worth, he explains, and his frustrations
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