Streten’s been open about his struggles with anxiety and alcohol before - in 2020, on a podcast with then-girlfriend Paige Elkington, he revealed he’d come to rely on alcohol to get through stage fright and the rigmarole of press and touring. While he says he had it easier than some of his peers who’d have to DJ into the early morning, the constant rotation of stages and hotels and buses and air-con - and the easy availability of alcohol - took its toll. It’s a strange place to inhabit, he admits. “Then I turned 30.”Ī post shared by Flume artists live in a strange, liminal world - it’s always the dance floor, always the come up, always a party. “I had a year-and-a-half of my twenties,” he laughs. It was just nice, just really, really sweet. “I would start to get to know the people that worked at the general store, say hi to people on the street.

“I felt like I was finally living my twenties for the first time and had a feeling of a sense of community,” Streten says. On the Northern Rivers, without the constant deadlines and pressure and tour dates endlessly stretched out before him, he could breathe the clean air. He’d get back and try to reconnect with old friends, finding they’d moved on. “I didn’t realise that I’d missed out on my twenties,” he says somewhat wistfully. “I never really thought about that idea of missing out on university, like people having their twenties.”Įven something as simple as having a circle of friends was difficult to manage when he’d be on tour for six months at a time. For the first time in his adult life, his days were taken up with simple things: growing vegetables, surfing, going to get coffee with his dad, walking, being in nature. Streten bought a property on the Northern Rivers, just down the road from his friend and longtime artistic collaborator Jonathan Zawada. He picked up a Grammy for second album Skin, found himself splashed across tabloid pages after he stuck his face in his girlfriend’s ass at Burning Man, collaborated with some of the biggest artists on the planet, and became a bona fide sex symbol.īut in coming home, Flume realised there was something crucial he hadn’t done for a long, long time: lived like a normal human being. So I was like, what the fuck am I doing here? I could be like, living in paradise in Australia.”įor 10 years, since the release of his self-titled debut album - which went double-platinum in Australia and picked up a number of pointy trophies at the ARIAs - Flume had never stopped, scaling the charts in the US and becoming a fixture at the top of festival posters worldwide. I wanted to like come back and hang out with my parents and live a simpler existence, all the things I was over there for weren’t happening.

I’d been over there for a bunch of years and like barely seen them. “I was like ‘I wanna see my dad’, what if my dad got COVID and died? Like, I don’t know. He was struggling to write new music, and so Flume - real name Harley Streten - decided it was time to get the hell out of there. “I was like, ‘what the fuck am I doing here?” Streten says, sitting in a booth at the Old Clare Hotel in Chippendale on a cool and sunny Monday. He’d broken up with his girlfriend, and the spectre of the pandemic was just starting to bear down on the city - ripples of panic spreading throughout the city. In early 2020, Flume had had enough of Los Angeles. Want more Junkee in your life? Sign up to our newsletter, and follow us on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook so you always know where to find us.

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