Almost two decades after Adam Hyde and Reuben Styles became best friends at a Canberra skate park, their dance act Peking Duk has finally released its debut album, Paradise — and the pair are the first to admit the timing raises an obvious question.
Why Did Peking Duk Wait So Long for a Debut Album?
For Styles, the answer is simple: why not now? "We've done about 16 years now of Duk just doing singles," he says. "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 exciting again."
Hyde points to the era in which the duo came up as a key factor. The culture around electronic dance music in the early days was firmly singles-driven — make a track, release a track, move on. "There was no calling for an album necessarily," he explains. Over time, that approach hardened into a cycle they found difficult to break. "We found ourselves stuck in this rhythm. 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."
Styles puts it more bluntly: "Every single you drop then fortifies the prison you've made around yourself."
A Change in Mindset — and a Team Farewell
Shifting into album mode, the duo say, fundamentally changed how they thought about making music. Rather than anxiously measuring each release against commercial expectations, they found themselves asking a different question entirely. "The second we got into album mode, it just made us completely unthink 'Is it going to do well or not?'" Styles explains. "It just made us think, 'Is it sick or not?' We f---ed off the whole rule book."
Hyde also alludes to a more personal obstacle that had kept the pair constrained for years. Without naming the individual, he says there was someone within their team whose presence made it very difficult to move forward. "There was somebody that we had to farewell in order to move forward," he says candidly. "In hindsight, 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 did not elaborate further on the circumstances.
The Soundtrack of Australian Summers
The album's title, Paradise, is no accident. Hyde and Styles describe it as a love letter to a very specific kind of Australian experience — not the glossy postcard version, but the sweaty, unpretentious reality of a caravan park holiday. Hyde paints the picture: an overflowing ashtray, a warm beer, a tinny speaker, and people from all walks of life somehow getting along perfectly.
"We want to write a love letter to all the caravan resorts out there," Styles says. "The places that are such beautiful parts of your childhood that you took a little bit for granted." He gives a particular nod to the caravan resorts of Jervis Bay — classic Canberran territory.
A Career Built on Dance Floor Hits
The wait for a full-length record has done nothing to diminish Peking Duk's standing. Over their career, the duo have collected multiple ARIA Award wins and nominations, landed a string of tracks in the Hottest 100, and sold out tours repeatedly across Australia. Tracks like High (2014) and Stranger (2016) became festival anthems, helping define the sound of Australian dance music through the 2010s. Their roots in Canberra's club scene — they name-check local venue Block 33 with obvious affection — and the heyday of Sydney's Kings Cross shaped a style of supercharged EDM that proved remarkably durable.
With Paradise now out, it seems the machine they once felt trapped inside has finally been rebuilt on their own terms.
