Behind The Scenes Of Hermitude's Breakthrough Year

“The crowds coming to our shows now are a lot younger and just a whole bunch of new fans have discovered us. A lot of people probably think that Hyperparadise is our first record,” says Luke Dubber, one half of Blue Mountains electronic duo Hermitude.

“We used to play at a place called the Republic Bar down in Hobart, which is this great bar and we’d been playing it for years. We wouldn’t quite sell it out, but we knew the bartender and the people who owned it.”

“I think it was on the Hyperparadise tour that everything kicked in and we went down and sold it out well in advance and the owner was like, ‘Geez, your crowd’s changed, haven’t they? There’s plenty of one-pot screamers out there.'”

While it’s an oft-used cliche, Luke and his partner in crime, Angus Stuart, have spent the last few years in the eye of a hurricane that keeps going up in category. The release of their fifth album, Dark Night Sweet Light, back in May, took things to a whole new level.

“It’s such an unpredictable industry and I guess we’ve always just tried to make sure that each record we release takes us up another notch and raises our profile somewhat,” Luke explains.

“I guess we managed to do that over the years and I remember when we released Threads, our third record, it kind of plateaued a little bit and we decided to have a break.”

“Not just because of that but because we’d been doing it seven years and had our own little things going on, and then came back together about a year later and wrote Hyperparadise and that’s when we started jumping from one level to 20 levels and it feels like we’ve jumped 50 levels with this last record.”

So does 2015 feel like a breakthrough year? “It has,” Luke admits. “2012 felt like a real breakthrough year with Hyperparadise, that felt like a real dramatic step-up. And this one, as well, it’s kind of like we were taking baby steps for many years and then we went leaps and bounds on the last two records.”

“It’s felt like that ever since Hyperparadise, to be honest. It’s been a real kind of steady incline for us and we’ve had just really great successes with a lot of stuff we’ve done.”

“Even the first single that we put off Dark Night, Sweet Light was actually ‘Ukiyo’, ‘Through The Roof’ was the official one but we actually put ‘Ukiyo’ up on a blog in the UK and it just kind of caught on like wildfire and went viral.”

“So I felt even back then that this wave we’ve been riding since Hyperparadise is still going strong. So when Dark Night, Sweet Light it just felt like it was escalating again, like were on the top of this massive tsunami.”

Some may call it luck or just a spin of the industry roulette wheel, but as Luke explains, Hyperparadise not only heralded a change in the profile of the duo but also in their commitment to the project they’ve been working on for 15 years.

“With Hyperparadise we started this routine of really diligent writing sessions and coming in every day and just working kind of business hours,” he explains.

“I guess we’d come into the studio with ideas and direction for a record, we definitely have things we want to tick off, so we’re definitely trying to cater to those things we want to get done with a record.”

“But at the same time, we’re just in here writing all the time and pretty much just trying to get as good as we can at it, so that’s what we did with the new record, we kept going and kept working hard and kept in mind the direction of the record.”

“We wanted to take it a bit more international. We’ve always had that on our radars, being able to play gigs around the world and just share our music with everyone around the world.”

“That was a big thing and obviously we had stylistic ideas, we deliberately wrote a more minimalist record and a brighter record, sonically, a bit more of a shimmering sort of record.”

The group’s shimmering new sound saw them play their biggest shows to date in Australia, as well as overseas. “The US tour was great. We played some huge festivals, some of the biggest shows to date we’ve done, like Lollapalooza and Hard festival, and we did a bunch of club shows as well,” Luke recounts.

“There’s a great following, it’s really starting to kick in over there. And then there’s parts of America you go to and there’s not as much of a following… we’d play in LA and San Francisco and New York and Chicago and get really great numbers and then go to Minneapolis and play to really small crowds.”

“It’s a gradual process over there and we try and go over as much as we can just to maintain a presence.” It’s all part of a day in the life of Hermitude, which has become a full-time gig for both Luke and Angus.

“I guess it’s not necessarily about confidence but more about opportunities and possibilities,” says Luke when we asked him when he and Angus felt confident enough to rely on music for their full-time income.

“We’ve always been confident and always loved music and it’s always what we’ve just done, but in the beginning it takes a long time to get off the ground so you just have your jobs on the side.”

“But we played in a lot of bands back in the early days, so Hermitude was a part of a bigger picture for us solely living off music and now Hermitude has taken the frontline and is basically all we do.”

“Even though we have a lot of other muso friends and bands we like to play with we don’t have time anymore, it’s become a full time job maintaining the writing and the gigging and press you have to do for it.”

With the biggest Australian tour of their careers just a month away, we asked Luke what advice he thinks is most important to a musician in what he admits is an “unpredictable industry”.

“It’s a hard question,” he says, “there’s a lot of facets to it. One of them is just sticking with it, to use a cliche. You know, when you leave high school and go to uni and everyone does what they do and there’s always a bunch of people in high school who were musicians in high school.”

“But then they end up getting jobs and going for something a bit more secure. Being a musician isn’t a very secure life financially, I guess, so you kind of have to be prepared to have some pretty lean months or years, depending on how long it takes you.”

“Believe in yourself and what you do. Angus and I have always felt that our music is at a really high standard, enough to be on an international level.”