Life’s a party when you’re living in paradise. That’s the bassline according to Peking Duk, the duo of Adam Hyde and Reuben Styles, which has been dropping electronic bangers for more than decade and which, on Friday (Aug. 14), blew open the gates to Paradise, their debut album.
Good things and long waits, well, they’re fused at the hip. Paradise arrives with an array of guest talent, from Killer Mike, Rico Nasty, Phantogram, to Aussie singer and songwriter Matt Corby, and is three years in the making.
At the top of the 14-song collection, the familiar voice of Jack Thompson, the legendary actor and activist who led a slew of classic films in the ‘70s and ‘80s and presented to the world one of the enduring images of the hard-partying, and equally progressive, Australian bloke.
The lads got the surprise of their young lives when, in their teens, met Thompson in Hyde’s mother’s kitchen. “My mom’s got some friends in strange places. And Jack Thompson seems to be one of them,” he quips.
Another familiar sound, the Roland TB-303, the match that lit the ‘90s rave scene, drops in on the track, appropriately titled “Jack Thompson,” and the adventure in Paradise begins.
The production pair can’t be blamed for being idle. Or slack on output. Hyde recently completed the latest cycle as his alter-ego, the party-animal pop star Kelli Holiday, a project that yielded an ARIA Award (best video for “Dancing2”), a domestic top 3 album for Capital Fiction (his second solo effort), and tour dates across North America, the United Kingdom and Europe. Styles has been on the road, too, with Y.O.G.A. (You’re Only Great Always), his own solo project that drips in outlaw country spirit and after-hours rave energy.
“Coming back to Peking Duk,” says Hyde in a late-evening chat with Billboard at a pub in Paddington, central Sydney, “it makes us feel like, especially once we started working on the album, that we’re just f—ing kids again. We don’t know what we’re doing. There’s no expectation or pressure.”
The two mates got to work on Paradise as life began returning to a new-normal post-pandemic. The duo had parted ways after a lengthy relationship with Sony Music and struck a new deal with Virgin Music, a label-partnership type arrangement that leaves creative control in Peking Duk’s hands. “We just did a bit of a reset,” says Styles. “We’ve been doing singles for 16 years now, we’ve never done an album. And we started to cook from absolutely nowhere. It felt like fun.”
“Fun” could be Hyde and Styles’ middle names. In August 2024, the lads were front and center of a buzzy cultural moment when they headlined a carpark rave at a Bunnings outlet in Melbourne, the Australian home improvements chain. Two years earlier, they teamed with KFC for a one-off menu item. It was called the Peking Cluck Burger.
The lads met at a skate park in their hometown, Canberra, a town that has produced some of the Australia’s hottest acts of late, including Genesis Owusu and Teen Jesus And The Jean Teasers.
“All of our core memories were formed in our town,” Hyde reflects. “Growing up in Canberra, it really was paradise. It’s awesome living for every single f—ing moment.”
Peking Duk completed their first aerial move with the 2014 single “High” featuring Nicole Millar, which crashed the top 10 on the ARIA Chart (peaking at No. 5), bagged an ARIA for best dance release and came in at No. 2 on triple j’s Hottest 100 countdown. They partnered with SAFIA on followup “Take Me Over,” and with Styalz and Swedish electro-pop act Elliphant for 2016’s “Stranger,” which collected song of the year at the ARIAs.
With this new project, Hyde and Styles went with a new approach in the studio. These two seasoned professionals competed. “It was like a video game. Like Mario Kart. Who’s gonna f—ng win?,” recounts Hyde. “Leaning into each other’s strengths on this record has been the growth of us as humans.”
Styles describes the creative process as like working a ball of putty, and “making this weird little f—ing gremlin. It was like, you f—ing make his nose. I’ll make the eyes, and then let’s jam on the hat.”
That teamwork results in a joyful collection. A party, even, with touches of Avalanches, soul and small-hour vibes.
Hyde has the last word. “We knew all that we really cared about was just making a f—ng sick album,” he says. “There were a couple of exciting distractions along the way. But nothing was more exciting than just being idiots in the studio, just fumbling around with 303s and just getting lost in the music.”
Stream Paradise below.
