When Adam Hyde closes his eyes and pictures the Australia he loves, he’s not really thinking about a beach. “There’s an ashtray with heaps of cigs in it,” he explains. “There’s a beer that’s almost done but it’s really hot. There’s a shitty speaker somewhere and there’s all these characters, from all walks of life, and they all seem to get along.”

Hyde’s Peking Duk bandmate Reuben Styles nods across the table from him. “We want to write a love letter to all the caravan resorts out there,” Styles continues. “The places that are such beautiful parts of your childhood that you took a little bit for granted. You think of a trailer park in the American sense. It sounds trashy as, but we call them caravan resorts. It’s paradise.”

Styles takes a sip of his Coke. “Shout out to the beach caravan resorts of Jervis Bay,” he smiles, forever a Canberran.

The cigs aren’t exactly overflowing in the Imperial Hotel in Paddington, where Hyde and Styles are sitting in the middle of a vast, empty front bar on a Monday afternoon. We’re sitting here because nearly 20 years after becoming best friends in a Canberra skate park and forming one of Australia’s most popular dance acts, Peking Duk are finally releasing their debut album, Paradise. The first and most obvious question to ask is, why now?

“I think it’s more of a why not,” Styles answers. “We’ve done about 16 years now of Duk just doing singles. Whenever you feel like things are getting a little bit repetitive in any sense, shaking it up and trying something totally new just makes the whole thing f---ing exciting again.”

“I think the era that we came up in, we were just making beats for clubs,” Hyde adds. “There was no calling for an album necessarily. It was like, ‘just make the track, put out the track’. And then we kind of found ourselves … not trapped – that’s very dramatic – but we found ourselves stuck in this rhythm. And once these songs found some skerricks of success, we were kind of like, ‘Okay, well, we should keep that going’. We were bound to the structure of drop a single, do a tour. It became a bit of a machine that we created ourselves.”

That machine gifted them great success. A scan over their CV reveals multiple ARIA award wins and nominations for bounding festival-fillers like 2014’s High and 2016’s Stranger; a fistful of Hottest 100 placements; sold-out tour after sold-out tour. Their brand of spiralling, supercharged EDM, born from the scrappy clubs in Canberra (shout out Block 33, say the pair) and the heyday of Sydney’s Kings Cross, helped define Australian dance in the 2010s. For year after year, the duo would drop one or two big-hitting singles and then crisscross the country in what seemed like endless loops.

“Every single you drop then fortifies the prison you’ve made around yourself,” Styles laughs. “When you’re doing just one or two singles a year, you’re really hoping for some type of result from the single. I feel like the second we got into album mode, it just made us completely unthink ‘Is it going to do well or not?’ It just made us think of, ‘Is it sick or not?’. We f---ed off the whole rule book.”

“I should add,” Hyde jumps in. “There was a long period of time where there was somebody in our team that made things very hard for us to move forward, in many ways. I don’t want to shit on anyone, but there was somebody that we had to farewell in order to move forward. I think in hindsight, just sitting here now, candidly speaking, it’s like that was a big thing that held us in our own constraints of like, ‘It’s got to be like this. Picture perfect, Peking Duk!’”

The duo don’t elaborate about the team member they farewelled, except to add it feels like they now have the keys to their own car back. “We’re stealing our own car and doing burnouts,” Hyde smiles.

‘We were bound to the structure of drop a single, do a tour. It became a bit of a machine that we created ourselves.’Adam Hyde, Peking Duk

Stretching across 14 tracks and featuring an extensive guest list that includes Killer Mike, Matt Corby, Phantogram, Rico Nasty and Kah-Lo, Paradise feels polished and focused. Rather than building a Frankensteinian monster of offcuts from over the years, the duo went into sessions in LA with a clean slate, determined to build something fresh.

The album loosely wraps around the concept of a pirate ship sailing into paradise – where paradise is an empty metaverse of being famous, being seen. Its best tracks, like Forever with Phantogram and Let Go with Matt Corby, take on this dreamy, somewhat melancholy air.

After 16 years as Peking Duk, the project is no longer their sole focus: Hyde is now arguably better known around the country as Keli Holiday thanks to the success of 2025 track Dancing2, while Styles has been busy flirting with alt-country as Y.O.G.A. While they’re steadfast that both ventures feed the creative fire rather than extinguishing it, they admit it’s led to some awkward moments with festivals. “Promoters will try and do a cheeky thing, where they’ll book Reuben and then book me and will say ‘Oh you’re both in, we’ve got some decks here!’,” Hyde laughs. “But God bless them, they’ve got a hard job, I guess.”

In the week leading up to our chat, the local music industry has been tearing itself apart over the number-one song on the Australian airplay charts. Josh Fawaz’s Madonna cover, Like A Prayer, reportedly used generative AI tools in its construction. Fawaz has since added AI credits to the track. Styles laughs in disbelief.

“I can’t believe it,” he says. “I landed in Australia three days ago just to find out the number one song played on Australian radio is AI vocals… I wonder what the average person listening to [radio station] KIIS, for example, how they feel about the song or if they’re just like, ‘Oh yeah, don’t mind’? Would you have dinner at a restaurant on your birthday if you knew there was no human cooking your steak?”

“To me, it’s like, do you want perfect? If you want perfect, go get it,” Hyde adds. “But music and art and romance, love and hate, it’s so far from perfect. The longing is the most crucial part of the experience. If you lose that, it kills everything. The whole thing … it’s heartbreaking. Even if you were to program a bot to make it more imperfect, then it’s like, what are we doing?!”

We’re sitting not too far from the Hordern Pavilion, where the young pair would attend hard-style raves as teens. Their lives are a little different now: Styles will soon head off to have some quality time with his child; he excitedly talks about the new bike he’s bought them. “I had a kid and got daggy,” Styles smiles, reflecting on their 20-year-long friendship. “Adam went to LA and got sexy.”

“There are moments when we’re drunk and we put our arms around each other and cry,” says Hyde. “And I think that’s f---ing awesome. To have a bond like that, that’s truly special.”

Peking Duk’s debut album Paradise is out now. Their national Paradise Tour includes shows at Brisbane’s The Tivoli on October 17, Sydney’s Roundhouse on November 7, and Melbourne’s The Timber Yard on November 27.

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