The machines are already in the studio, so you may as well learn how they work.
When Empire Of The Sun released Walking on a Dream in 2008, Luke Steele and Nick Littlemore did not exactly look like they belonged to the moment.
The robes, chrome headpieces, desert landscapes and giant, gleaming synth-pop all felt like they had arrived from somewhere further down the line.
Nearly two decades later, that is still the appeal.
Empire Of The Sun have always been good at making the future feel close enough to touch, and Steele’s latest comments on artificial intelligence suggest he is once again getting comfortable with an idea the rest of the music industry is still trying to work out.
For Steele, AI is not some great destroyer of human creativity. He sees it more like a new piece of studio equipment.
His description is a “really smart guitar pedal” – a tool that can bend an idea, throw it somewhere unexpected or help an artist move past the point where a song has stopped giving anything back.
That is more or less how Empire Of The Sun are using it.
Rather than feeding a prompt into a generator and waiting for a finished song to fall out, Steele and Littlemore have built custom tools that work alongside their existing process.
One is called Song Mountain, a lyric generator stocked with ancient quotes, scripture and fragments of conversation picked up from the street. It is less about outsourcing the writing and more about stirring the pot, throwing together images or phrases that might crack open a new direction.
They have also used AI to blend wildly different musical references and drag unfinished ideas somewhere more useful.
Steele gave one particularly Empire Of The Sun example: asking what might happen if Aphex Twin got drunk with Tom Waits in 1970.
It sounds slightly unhinged, but it also makes perfect sense for a duo that has never been especially interested in doing things the obvious way.
A lot of music gets stranded at the 40-second mark. There is a good loop, half a melody and maybe the bones of a chorus, but nothing that quite pushes it into becoming a full song.
That is where Steele sees the value.
AI can throw a curveball into the room. It can offer a strange texture, an unlikely combination or a new way into an idea that has gone stale. The artist still has to decide what is worth keeping.
The technology has also become part of Empire Of The Sun’s visual world.
Generative tools have been used across live visuals and music videos, including PNAU and Empire Of The Sun’s ‘AEIOU’, which combined AI-assisted motion capture and image generation with 3D animation.
Steele has also spoken about using Midjourney to mix his own paintings with references to designers including Alexander McQueen and John Galliano, before taking the results to real costume makers.
Again, the machine was not creating the finished piece. It was helping him sketch out something that did not exist yet.
That difference is important, particularly while the wider music industry continues to argue over scraped work, copyright, environmental costs and whether AI removes the human spirit from the process.
There are plenty of good reasons for artists to be wary. There are also plenty who see the technology as another sampler, synth or production tool that will eventually become part of the furniture.
Steele has made it fairly clear which side he sits on.
“AI is going to empower artists that know how to use it, and they’re going to become unstoppable,” he said, warning that those who resist it entirely could be swallowed by the technology “like a boogie monster at night.”
It is a very Luke Steele way to explain it.
He may be right, or he may simply be early again. Either way, Empire Of The Sun are already working out what the rest of the music industry is still arguing about.
