

I played him a bunch of ideas and he was not particularly into any of them at first. We did some music in Vegas, we both played the same festival and then afterwards, we got in the studio together. I've been a huge fan of Damon Albarn, with Blur and Gorillaz growing up, it was always one of my biggest inspirations, or he was, and I'd always wanted to work with him and I actually managed to get in touch with him. Touching on the collaborations, there’s some new faces and some old, how did those come about? There’s just all sorts of interesting kinds of angles to look at the world through, so we base the world on that and build it out from there. Maybe it's as obvious as Greenpeace or maybe one of the world's largest arms dealers. So then we created this motorbike rider, and we were like, let's do the branding with a condom brands or vasectomy brands or euthanasia companies. Because as we all know, it's kind of what's destroying Mother Nature the most.

I was speaking to Jonathan for a while about this idea: What if Mother Nature somehow owned a Fortune500 company? What would Mother Nature invest in? Then we were thinking, well, it's probably things that are detrimental to human existence or preventative. We wanted to build out this world, at least the visual world, and make it really feel cohesive.

Well, I mean, it's like a bunch of collaborations with other people and there's not really a strict narrative throughout the record. The music and visuals were inspired by the Australian flora and fauna surrounding him in NSW's Northern Rivers after escaping COVID and his home in Los Angeles.What sort of ideas were you playing with on the album? That’s when all the music came together.” "Felt like I had a lot of clarity, felt much more grounded, living a really simple life. “I called it Palaces because I felt like when I returned home… It felt like my palace," Flume told triple j last month. The album features guest spots from Gorillaz and Blur mastermind Damon Albarn, LAUREL, Spain’s Vergen Maria, France’s Oklou, and fellow Australians Emma Louise and long-term Flume fave Kučka. Out 20 May, Palaces follows on from 2019 mixtape Hi This Is Flume and blockbuster 2016 album Skin.
