Luke Steele and Daniel Johns of Dreams (Photo: EMI)

Casual fans who haven’t followed Daniel Johns since the mid-’90s — when his Australian rock trio, Silverchair, rode the grunge wave to the top of the alt-rock charts with “Tomorrow” and “Pure Massacre,” and earned comparisons to Pearl Jam and Soundgarden — might be shocked to see and hear him now. The 39-year-old artist, who has joined forces with longtime friend Luke Steele, of Empire of the Sun, in the superstar electro-duo DREAMS, barely resembles the lank-haired teen of Silverchair’s Frogstomp and Freak Show.

In the dystopian video for the glitchy, post-punk/disco title track of DREAMS’ debut album, No One Defeats Us, Johns (going by the stage name “Dr. Dreams”) and Steele (now known as “Miracle”) prowl through a graffiti-scrawled, downtown L.A. hellscape, wielding baseball bats and megaphones — with a shorn-headed Johns a rocking a post-apocalyptic-party look of fun-fur coat, sequined skort, and A Clockwork Orange-style neon contact lens. And, just in case anyone doubted Johns’s commitment to this new project, he has the word “DREAMS” tattooed in a large Gothic font across his entire throat.

“Pretty much in the last two years, this record has become its own monster, and we put all the other stuff to the side to focus on this band,” Johns tells Yahoo Entertainment, sitting with Steele at KROQ’s Coachella house as Dreams prepare to play their first-ever live show.

“You should’ve seen his face when we couldn’t get the [Dreams.com] domain name!” Steele quips.

“We had a photo shoot arranged, and we were talking about the look, getting everything organized,” Johns says of his decision to permanently ink himself with his new band’s name. “And then the night before, we had talked about getting temporary tattoos. And I just went, ‘I’m just going to get [a real tattoo]!’ We were right in the middle of recording the record, so we were deep in DREAMS. I just thought, ‘I’m just gonna get it and make a point.’ Now I’m stuck with it.”

“Well, there’s something I want to tell you: The band’s over,” Steele jokes.

DREAMS are, in fact, just getting started, and they’re definitely “not some side-project we cobbled together,” Johns stresses. And those who have been closely following Johns’s career in recent years shouldn’t be so surprised that he is taking yet another artistic risk. He’s constantly evolved since Silverchair’s early days, be it via the confessional anorexia ballad “Ana’s Song (Open Fire)” in 1999, the sweeping orch-pop of Silverchair’s breakthrough Diorama in 2002 and the sleek electro-rock of its 2007 follow-up Young Modern, or his techno project with DJ Paul Mac, the Dissociatives. His 2015 debut solo album, Talk, was even almost completely guitar free and had a trippy, experimental R&B vibe.

Johns is aware than many old-school fans would love for him to return to the classic Silverchair sound, but he’s not bothered. “People still remember ‘Tomorrow,’ right? Oh well. That hasn’t been a struggle for me. I think it’s been a struggle for them,” he says. “I don’t know what my reaction is supposed to be to that. Am I supposed to like, ‘Gosh, sorry, I apologize!’ And plug my guitar back in?”

Silverchair (Daniel Johns, left) in 1996. (Photo: Bob Carey/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)

Johns says it was “probably when [he] left school” that he became more artistically adventurous. “I’d started writing different stuff because I knew I wasn’t going to get hassled,” he says. “Diorama is the record is when I thought to myself, ‘F*** this. I want to be really, really good.’” That album, Silverchair’s fourth, wasn’t as big as its predecessors (although it did go to No. 1 in Australia and No. 7 in New Zealand), but it was around that time that Johns and Steele first became acquainted, and they became fast friends and mutual admirers.

Luke Steele and Daniel Johns of Dreams (Photo: EMI)

Johns knows that Empire of the Sun’s fans may be resistant to it as well. But to that, he shrugs: “We’re going to do whatever we want. We don’t give a f***. … The thing is people really have to realize is, as important as it is to us, it’s just art. It’s just music. We’re not stealing your mate’s laptop or kicking your bins over. We’re just writing music. If you don’t like it, you don’t have to listen to it. I never understood why people get so uppity about it.”

“Music is so spiritual and it’s so emotional — how can you not change, right?” Steels adds. “You’re not gonna make love to your wife the exact same way every night. Or as a surfer, it’s never gonna be the same wave.”

So far, though, the response to the project has been largely positive — as evidenced by the crazy crowd reaction at their incendiary Coachella debut on a Mohave Tent stage decorated with flaming garbage cans, inoperative pay phones, and Commodore 64 graphics to look like a scene from one of the duo’s favorite films, The Warriors. And regardless, the two are having a blast with Dreams’ DIY, punk-rock approach.  “A lot of other people might think we’ve lost our minds, but we’re not changing anything. This is how it is,” Johns says, chuckling.

“We’ve been directing the videos; I’ve been editing the videos. We’ve been styling all the wardrobe. It’s come back to high school, basically, and we just make art, which has been the most therapeutic thing I think I’ve felt for years,” says Steele, describing their wild creative process as tapping into their shared “brain tentacle.”

Luke Steele and Daniel Johns of Dreams (Photo: EMI)

And so, DREAMS are here to stay. But don’t expect their next album — which, hopefully, won’t take another 14 years to come out — to sound just like No One Defeats Us, because like everything Steele and Johns do together, this band is very much a work in progress.

“It’s really character-driven,” says Daniel “Dr. Dreams” Johns. “It’s like there are animals inside us that need to come out. I think Miracle and Dr. Dreams are still kind of coming into their own as characters. Like, next year’s Coachella might be a bit weird.”

This article originally ran on Yahoo Music.

(Empire of the Sun perform at the Doritos #MixArcade at E3 2016. Photo by Randy Shropshire/Getty Images)

Luke Steele, frontman of Australian space-rockers Empire of the Sun, jokes that he’s “slowly becoming an American” after living in Los Angeles for several years. “L.A., they say, is the storytelling capital of the world,” he says, chatting with Yahoo Music backstage before Empire’s concert at the Doritos Mix Arcade event at Los Angeles’s E3 Gaming Expo this week. “It’s an imaginative playground for all ages. I think it’s the gateway to the world, really. That’s what’s exciting for me. The opportunities are endless.”

However, after the tragic massacre at gay nightclub Pulse last weekend (along with the gunning down of Voice star Christina Grimmie in the same city, Orlando), one has to ask what the Perth-born Steele thinks of America these days. After strict gun-control laws were instated in his native country 20 years ago, the chances of being murdered by a gun in Australia plunged by 72 percent, according to Reuters — and the country has had no mass shootings since. Many gun-control activists cite Australia’s policies when criticizing the more lenient gun laws in America.

“No one has guns in Australia – except for the police, or farmers. That just seems to make sense,” Steele says. “Why does everyone need a gun? That’s just what I do not understand. It’s kind of scary, the way the world is going… I just don’t understand why they don’t just ban guns [in the United States]. Like, if someone wants to be President, why don’t they make that one of the things they’ll do?”

For now, though, Steele is still living the American dream: His group’s fittingly titled debut single, “Walking on a Dream,” has surprisingly become their first U.S. radio hit a full eight years after its original release, thanks to its inclusion in a Honda commercial. The unexpected revival of the title track off Empire’s debut LP hasn’t derailed the group’s plans to release their yet-untitled third album, which they just completed last week — but, Steele admits, it certainly has “turned up the stakes a bit.”

Steele describes the forthcoming album, which was partially recorded at two iconic American studios (Jim Henson Studios in Hollywood, and Island Studios in Hawaii, where Kanye West recorded 808s & Heartbreak), as “a warm summer breeze, a warm record, a record that feels good. Everyone says it’s our best record — but I suppose people always say that!”

Most exciting, however, is that the album will feature two American rock icons, one of which is Fleetwood Mac’s Lindsey Buckingham. Considering that “I’ll Be Around,” from Empire’s 2013 sophomore effort Ice on the Dune, basically sounded like an outtake from Fleetwood Mac’s Mirage album, this new collaboration makes perfect sense.

“One of my favorite things to do is sit with my wife, drink white wine, and just listen to records once the kids have gone to bed. And I always end up emailing my manager and saying, ‘I wanna work with this person,’” Steele chuckles. “Nine times out of 10, they never get back to me. But Lindsey got back to us and said, ‘I love the band; I wanna come down to the studio.’ We jammed for about six hours, and then he came back the next day and we wrote this amazing song, ‘To Her Door.’”

The other collaboration on the third album, recorded just two weeks ago, is with Wendy Melvoin from Prince’s Revolution. “We were in Jim Henson Studio and she was there; we just happened to be in the same building and we said, ‘Do you want to play on this song?’ She loved the song, but she said, ‘There’s a certain part of the song that should go to your heart, like a post-chorus. This is the part I’m missing.’ So she added a bass part that goes to that deeper kind of level. It’s pretty amazing.”

Buckingham wasn’t the only collaborator on Steele’s late-night email wishlist. He’d love to work one day with Brian Wilson, but most of all, Steele’s dream duet would be with another American legend. “I’ve always loved Carole King since I was a kid. I’ve had so many adventures and experiences with Carole King, starting with my mother and father playing [her albums],” Steele reveals. “Or like, my first girlfriend was a Norwegian girl and then she left and I was heartbroken, and I just listened to Tapestry over and over. And the other day, my daughter had a music day at her school and the first song they sang was ‘You’ve Got a Friend.’ I kind of can’t escape it!”

Steele jokes that he’s “still waiting” to hear back from King, so perhaps that hoped-for collaboration won’t happen until album number four. In the meantime, Empire of the Sun’s Buckingham/Melvoin-assisted third album is slated for a “September or October” release, and fans can still hear “Walking on a Dream” pratically every time they switch on their TV sets.

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This article originally ran on Yahoo Music.