Hermitude

Hermitude are two multi-instrumentalists from the Blue Mountains of New South Wales, Luke Dubber (Luke Dubs) and Angus Stuart (Elgusto), and they'd been playing in bands together since 1994, when Dubber was 16 and Stuart just 11. Their first proper group, Funk Injection, even had Stuart's sister Aja on bass. The duo itself clicked in 2000, when Stuart came home from a trip to the US with a pair of turntables and they jammed, Dubs on keys, no singer. It worked so well they never bothered adding anything else.

They signed to Elefant Traks, the label the Herd built, and debuted with Imaginary Friends in 2002, a vinyl-only EP of oddball instrumental soundscapes with guest verses from Urthboy and Ozi Batla that sold out and never made it to CD. Alleys to Valleys followed in 2003, named for their shuttling between Sydney and the Sound Heaven studio.

The sound grew into something lush and hyperactive, hip-hop and electronic music jammed together like a sugar rush. HyperParadise, in 2012, gave them "Speak of the Devil" and a title track that took on a second life when Flume remixed it into woozy, stuttering shapes. They picked up the Australian Music Prize along the way, and Dark Night Sweet Light followed in 2015 with "The Buzz", a sunny, strutting groove built for festival fields.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.