Golden Features (Thomas Stell) is one of the biggest names in Australian dance music. However, he’s long been reclusive, hiding his face behind a gold mask. Now gradually shedding his persona, the Sydney producer is back with a mythic second album, Sisyphus – a paean to Berlin’s liberating party scene. But he is ambivalent about the spotlight and on Sisyphus he frees the inner underground artist within. “It’s a love-hate relationship and it’s a double-edged sword,” he admits of his disguise. “I love it and I hate it.”
Thomas, who goes by Tom, is conducting last minute promotional interviews from New York via phone, apologising for “a terrible line”. In the midst of a North American headlining tour, he’s exploring the city’s Lower East Side.
In fact, he is feeling “a bit numb” about releasing Sisyphus. He furnished the album only days prior to his departure Stateside in mid-June, despite sharing the hooky lead single, Touch, featuring Melbourne’s Rromarin, over a year ago. “Finishing the record was a lot more laborious than I thought – it just took everything out of me,” he rues. “A large part of my life was consumed by writing the thing, so now’s the easy part. You just kinda push it out into the ocean and hope it doesn’t sink.”
From Graffiti To Golden Features
Today he remains relatively unknown, his pressers full of streaming stats, chart positions and certifications rather than biographical details. Although “shy”, he’s genial, generous and unguarded in person, acknowledging lingering anxiety. Surprisingly, too, Tom, who consistently plays the US, still resides in Sydney. “I have a very hard time letting go of that, to my American agent’s dismay,” he says wryly.
And it was in Sydney where he, as a teen, first seriously threw himself into creative endeavour: graffiti. He eventually abandoned the subculture, as observing other street artists copping jail sentences was “a deal breaker”. “It was like, ‘I know I’m addicted to this, I know I love this, but I wanna travel the world. I want more than a couple hundred photos of trains I’d painted by the time I die.'” He pauses, laughing. “If I told myself what I said just then when I was 16, I woulda called myself a fuckwit, I think! But, in growing up a little bit, you’re like, ‘Man, there’s more to life than getting up.'”
He began experimenting with electronic music, uploading early efforts onto SoundCloud. Yet the furtiveness of the graff endured. Indeed, he followed a hallowed tradition in especially electronica of concealing his identity – foregrounding the music while generating mystique.
“I grew up on [masked] artists like MF DOOM and Daft Punk and even The Bloody Beetroots, to a lesser extent, as I was discovering dance music. [But] my background was graffiti.
“Graffiti is done in a clandestine way. It’s under the dark of night and you want people to see your work. The worst thing that can happen is they see your face. I wanted that to transfer over to the music – because I am not an outgoing person. I’m an introvert and, through and through, I enjoy being alone. I enjoy my privacy.
“The idea of putting your face out there for everyone to see just had nothing to do with the art for me. At what point is it about the artists and not the artwork anymore? We see it so much in pop music. I just had this set of rules. I didn’t want that.”
Tom as Golden Features in 2014 with his self-titled debut EP, which, spawning the single Tell Me (featuring Nicole Millar), he says, “changed my life” – and impressed Porter Robinson. He’d briefly be associated with the aerial, and textural, ‘Australian sound’ ushered in by Flume – Golden Features was even rumoured to be Flume’s deep house vehicle. But, hype aside, he worried as his image, and speculation about his identity, became a distraction. “It’s all anyone could talk about,” he recalls.
Though his future bass was darker than Flume’s, he ventured into pop, recording with vocalists such as Julia Stone. In 2018 the triple j fave presented his first album, SECT, via Warner Music, and it paradoxically established Golden Features paradoxically as a cult crossover act.
Between LPs, he pursued collaborative projects – cutting an EP with The Presets as well as 2020’s blockbuster BRONSON album alongside the US alt-EDM combo ODESZA, describing himself as “the third wheel”. He belongs to ODESZA’s Ninja Tune-backed Foreign Family Collective and he’ll shortly fly to Seattle to “hang out” with them – possibly laying down fresh BRONSON material.
“You learn a lot working with other people,” he reflects. “You learn a lot about being a democracy and what ideas should get through and what ideas are good to stop where they are.” Weirdly, he was also credited as a songwriter on Katy Perry’s unfairly maligned 2017 album Witness.
The Man In The Mirror
Still, once again labouring solitarily engendered self-doubt. “Unfortunately, when I’m left with myself and my own thoughts, I’m a mess,” Tom discloses. “I overthink things. I’m a perfectionist – which I can’t stand, to be honest with you. I think that old adage ‘Perfection is the enemy of good’ is very true.”
What’s more, he felt increasingly “conflicted” about his burnished mask – and branding. In EDM, slipping on distinctive headwear is now a marketing strategy, Marshmello’s arguably the most disingenuous – his authenticity is often questioned in online forums. Nevertheless, anonymity may even be counterintuitive in the digital age, with faceless music subsumed into algorithms and the looming threat of AI – and he wants his art to resonate. “The reality of the situation is, when I came into this, I wasn’t thinking about that from a business standpoint,” he emphasises. “My brain isn’t really wired that way.”
Ahead of Sisyphus, the secretive musician resolved “to be honest about who I am” and progressively reveal himself. “For me, it’s all about the representation of the artwork and, truthfully, the mask just felt like it was in the way of that. So I decided, ‘OK, rip the bandaid, show people what you look like – use it as a piece of jewellery now, rather than a way to disguise yourself.'”
Escape To Techno City
Ironically, even as an anonymous artist, Tom was jaded by fame. “To be frank, I’d fallen out of love with electronic music, just by overexposure.” Fortuitously, that shifted after he stayed in Berlin, having initially visited in 2016. Revelling in the city’s club counterculture, Tom reconnected with music – and himself. Unlike in Sydney, scenesters didn’t recognise him. He was able to be “a regular punter,” and found the experience freeing.
“I found a music scene there that was completely accepting of anyone, completely respectful, a little bit older in the demographic they pulled – and they were these spaces that could just completely take you out of the monotony of your everyday life and transport you to somewhere where it could be eight, 12, 15, 24 hours that you spent in that club. It would put you somewhere where that just evaporated for a moment in time. And I think, as we all get older and our lives become more convoluted and stressful, escapism is necessary.”
His adventures halted when the COVID-19 pandemic struck. Quarantining in Australia, he resumed production. But, striving to be “intentional”, Tom was soon prevaricating – ever “neurotic”. “I learnt I suppose [that] just art takes time,” he reasons. “Good art takes time and you can’t rush it. You can’t pretend; you can’t just put something out to put it out. I don’t have it in me to kind of put my name behind something that I’m not deeply proud of.”
Tom titled Sisyphus after the king in Greek mythology who cunningly evaded death, Hades punishing him with the task of interminably rolling a boulder up a hill. “My heritage is Greek,” he says. “So that story has always spoken to me. It’s morbid, if anything – so I think that speaks for me as well.”
He sees Sisyphus as an emotional “journey”, cringing at that word. Primarily, he ceased “making concessions,” embracing techno (tellingly, he deems Bicep’s Isles “absolutely stunning”). But Sisyphus is expansive, veering from Chemical Brothers-mode rave (Vigil) to industrial-pop (Flesh) to Burial-esque garage (Endit).
“This record in particular is the first time I’ve truly not given a fuck. It’s the first moment I’ve said, ‘I’m going to do what I like and what I wanna do, because it feels right.’
“I was like, ‘I just gotta let it go – I can’t keep torturing myself with the imaginary opinions of an imaginary audience that all share the same view of what music is and how it should sound.’
“The hardest challenge for any artist is overcoming their own headspace and their own ability to deal with criticism and perfectionism and low self-esteem or an unnaturally large ego or whatever it is.”
Instead of seeking high-profile vocalists, Tom recruited his old cohort Rromarin and, on the electroclash Vapid, Louisahhh – the credible American DJ/vocalist/producer, based in Paris and affiliated with Brodinski’s Bromance Records, epitomising “techno punk”. But many of the vocals are his own, including on the raw indietronica excursion Butch – among three co-writes with The Presets’ Julian Hamilton.
Embracing The Perfectly Imperfect
In August he will embark on an Australian run – first destination Melbourne’s Margaret Court Arena – before returning to Wollongong’s Yours & Owls Festival in October. Notably, his live shows aren’t pre-programmed, and every performance is unique. Oddly, the perfectionist doesn’t mind “mistakes”. “I think that’s where the beauty in music is – unintentional moments.”
As for his next move? “It’s funny, because I just don’t know,” he ponders. All I know about my ambitions are I wanna do whatever it takes to continue to be able to make music that’s true to my vision of what I want it to sound like.
“I don’t wanna make any compromises. I don’t wanna say, ‘Oh, we’re gonna release a pop song so I can make enough money to continue living off this thing.’ I wanna do it exactly the way I feel in the moment, no matter the downside, and push it as long as I can until I find happiness with what I’m doing – ’cause to date I’m not happy with a single piece of music I’ve put out.
“I think I’m chasing my tail – and I’m chasing a reality that never will be. I don’t think I’ll ever be happy with anything truly. But, every day, I kind of count my blessings that anyone’s listening to it or buying a ticket to a show or it’s having a positive effect on their life. So long as I can keep that going, I’ll keep doing it. The rest I hope just comes through in the music and falls into place, because the business side of things and worrying about the ‘what ifs’ just leads to anxiety about things that will never probably ever truly come to fruition.”
Golden Features’ new album Sisyphus is out now. He’s set to play a massive Australian tour in August, performing in Melbourne, Adelaide, Brisbane, Sydney, and Perth. He’ll also play Yours and Owls Festival in Wollongong in October. Find out more here.
Cyclone Wehner is a journalist specialising in hip-hop, R&B, dance music (Detroit techno!) and pop culture. She has spoken to Beyoncé, Rihanna, Pharrell Williams and a who’s who of dance music, including Kraftwerk. Cyclone has also DJed at Melbourne venues like Revolver. Her dream interview is Will Sharpe.
Twitter: @therealcyclone