‘I would never give up the process’: Lonelyspeck’s world of experimental, Pasifikafuturist pop
Feted by Troye Sivan, Charli xcx, and Bring Me The Horizon, Adelaide-based producer Sione Teumohenga has resurfaced with their long-awaited debut album – and the culmination of over a decade of pop experimentation and self-expression.
It’s been over a decade since Sione Teumohenga started releasing music as Lonelyspeck.
Like many musical projects that bubbled up from the primordial soup of 2010s online culture, Teumohenga had found an outlet using freely available software that was unleashing creativity in bedrooms around the world.
“I feel like I came up in this era where there was this mass democratisation of production,” Teumohenga tells InReview. “Where everyone was becoming bedroom producers, and suddenly everyone could make pop-standard songs on their laptop at home.
“I didn’t grow up with many resources – I just had to work with what I had, which was stuff I could find for free online.”
With a name cribbed from Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot, Lonelyspeck would become a vehicle for Teumohenga to explore pop production and sonic experimentation at the same time.
“I want it to be legible as pop music; I’ve always liked the idea of introducing people to like the weird stuff by making like, a good pop song that’s kind of covered in all this textural experimentation,” Teumohenga explains.
While their debut EP Presence explored glitchy electronic atmospheres, dreamlike vocals, and samples warped beyond recognition, Lonelyspeck’s sound would evolve to incorporate eviscerating grunge guitar breaks in one moment, and auto-tuned pop euphoria the next. On one recent song, Teumohenga drew inspiration from the call of Antarctica’s Weddell seal – even clearing the sample with the McMurdo Oceanic Observatory.
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Troye Sivan became an early fan as Teumohenga’s music spread via Twitter, Tumblr, and Soundcloud, and soon they were supporting American indie stars like Perfume Genius and Baths. A string of EPs — from 2017’s Lave to 2019’s Abyssal Body — saw them gain wider attention, from Charli xcx herself (who in 2019 livestreamed unreleased Lonelyspeck material on her internet radio show) to British metalcore giants Bring Me The Horizon. The latter tapped Teumohenga to contribute to their 2024 album POST HUMAN: NeX GEn., with frontman Oli Sykes calling Teumohenga a “genius”.
“I think the internet’s always been where I’ve found all the connections,” Teumohenga says of Lonelyspeck’s international reach. “Coming from Adelaide, there wasn’t really anyone doing the kind of stuff that I wanted to do, especially back when I started.”
Last month Teumohenga released their first full-length LP, the 11-track Crown of My Spirit. An ambitious body of work, the album pushes the project to deeper, wider and poppier extremes, as lyrical motifs invoke geological imagery and seismic forces to mine explore themes from gender identity to their Tongan heritage.
“I guess I use songwriting as a way of kind of grounding and getting in touch with my feelings,” they say. “I use it to pull the feelings out of myself.”
On early single ‘Fossil’, Teumohenga reflects on how masculine cultural norms pressure young people to shrink and suppress parts of themselves – “locking up your true self, letting it fossilise away,” they explain.
‘Are you doing it right? / Are you doing it like they told you? / All the yelling in the body? Can you drown without knowing?’
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“It’s very much about feeling this anger and grief about the way masculinity can be this toxic thing that’s used to crush the humanity of boys,” Teumohenga says, adding that the track’s flipside, ‘Amulet’, is about embracing both masculine and feminine parts of themself.
Teumohenga’s work is often accompanied by elaborate animated videos and digital artwork, in another act of self-taught world-building as seen in the clip for Crown of My Spirit’s lead single, ‘Wishing’.
Such world-building dovetails with one of Teumohenga’s other interests; for years they have curated a 100+ song playlist dubbed ‘PASIFIKAFUTURISM’, an idea that also filters into their work as Lonelyspeck.
“I’d always had a longing to see Pacific Islanders making experimental music and stuff that I was into,” Teumohenga says. “I do want to incorporate my identity as a Pacific Islander into my process, and for me that means not trying to reproduce the past; still learning from the past, but using the lessons of the past to live now and to prepare for the future. I think as time’s going on, that’s becoming a bigger and bigger part of my creative practice.”
Teumohenga says they grew up with little connection to their Tongan heritage, in a time when Adelaide had a relatively small Tongan community – something Teumohenga says was a “weird little experience”. Outside Lonelyspeck, they’ve also contributed to FAMILI, a collective project of Pasifika artists whose debut single ‘Firekeeper’ was released in June.
“That really feels like it’s capturing the ethos of Pasifikafuturism to me,” Teumohenga says of the project. “It feels collaborative in a way that I haven’t experienced before. It’s very community-driven; it’s not just about being a cool band, it’s about having community strength in this project, and empowering communities. I really believe in that.”
Crown of My Spirit also subtly nods to this community-building. “I was kind of exploring my own mythology of a Pacific world. I’m also interested in the idea of ‘Pacific fantasy’ – kind of an analog for what Tolkien did for Europe. I’m more and more interested in that as a vehicle for stories of resistance.”
"It’s not just about being a cool band, it’s about having community strength in this project and empowering communities."
It seems poignant that the decade of digital democratisation that empowered artists like Teumohenga to craft deeply personal work out of such eclectic influences – and build audiences and communities around the world – has also given birth to the rise of what they call a “slop economy”.
“It’s kind of like two sides of the same coin to me – in a way I think there’s a lot of instability and contradiction in where we are now,” Teumohenga reflects.
It’s only strengthened their resolve to make music and art that only they could make, from countless hours of tinkering, experimentation and self-expression – defiantly unlike anything an AI algorithm could generate with the most well-written prompt.
“I mean, it just makes me want to really commit to my vision,” Teumohenga says. “I would never give up the process. I give up the product before I give up the process.”
Crown of My Spirit is out now. Lonelyspeck will perform at Hybercube Infinite alongside Malibu (France) and Rắn Cạp Đuôi (Vietnam) at Queen’s Theatre on Friday September 5.