Flume

Flume is the project of Harley Streten, a producer from Sydney, Australia who basically rewired what “electronic music” was allowed to sound like. He started messing around with a CD mixing program he got out of a cereal box as a kid, which honestly tracks — nobody makes music this glitchy and playful without starting out just tinkering for fun. By 2011 he’d signed to the Sydney label Future Classic, and things moved fast from there.

The Breakthrough

His self-titled debut album, Flume, dropped in 2012 and shot straight to the top of the Australian charts. It’s the record that put “future bass” on the map as a genre people actually talked about, full of warped vocal chops, sub-heavy low end, and melodies that felt more like pop songs than club tracks. Singles like “Sleepless” turned him from a bedroom producer into a name festival bookers wanted on their posters. He wasn’t trying to make DJ-friendly bangers — he was building weird, detailed little worlds out of sound design, and somehow that ended up taking over Top 40 remixes and radio at the same time.

That sound design obsession only got sharper with 2016’s Skin, a record stacked with features (Tove Lo, Beck, Vince Staples, AlunaGeorge, and more) that ended up winning the Grammy for Best Dance/Electronic Album in 2017. Then, instead of chasing that formula, he went full chaos mode with Hi This Is Flume in 2019 — a mixtape that leaned hard into abrasive, experimental production and picked up a Grammy nomination of its own. It’s the project that made it clear Flume was never going to sit still creatively, even after winning the industry’s biggest award.

2022’s Palaces pulled in collaborators like Caroline Polachek and Damon Albarn and kept pushing his sound into stranger, more atmospheric territory. And he’s stayed busy since — 2025 alone brought We Live in a Society, a collaborative EP with JPEGMAFIA, and Dumb, a full collaborative album made with Australian singer-songwriter Emma Louise, led by the single “Easy Goodbye.”

Across a decade-plus career, Flume has worked with everyone from Lorde and Chet Faker to Beck and JPEGMAFIA, and he’s never really repeated himself. Whatever the format — album, mixtape, one-off collab EP — the throughline is the same: glitchy, hyper-detailed sound design that still somehow gets stuck in your head. He’s one of the few producers who genuinely built a genre around himself, and he’s still out here bending it into new shapes.