SHOUSE: A Decade of Dancefloor Devotion Culminates in ‘Collective Ecstasy’

Their long-awaited debut album, Collective Ecstasy, feels less like a debut and more like a weathered photo album — a decade of life, love, loss, and dance condensed into 12 tracks.

“Honestly it was quite an objective experience,” they say. “Almost like creating the greatest hits compilation of our odd SHOUSE career over the last ten years. The journey has been rocky and confusing, so the album might reflect that a bit. But overall there are lots of good moments along the way.”

You can hear that uneven magic throughout the record — old demos brushing against new voices, forgotten ideas blooming into full-bodied songs. It’s a tribute, as they put it, to “shared dancefloor experiences.” And how do you bottle that feeling in a studio, away from the bodies and bass bins?

“Turn the lights off,” they say, with the matter-of-fact wisdom of someone who’s tried everything else.

A Nostalgic Version of Melbourne

Though the album was made in Melbourne, SHOUSE aren’t really trying to capture the city’s sound. What they’ve created is something more personal — a ghost version of the place they came up in. “I would say that our album was created almost entirely in a nostalgic version of Melbourne,” they explain. “The surroundings and collaborators are reflections of the past.”

Those collaborators, both local and global, stretch across genres and scenes. There’s the tender melancholia of Vance Joy, the soulful precision of Cub Sport’s Tim Nelson, and underground heroes like Habits and Jace XL. “In the distant past, we would work with our contemporaries we liked around the local scene. Nowadays we work with contemporaries we like, but our people speak to their people, if you know what I mean. Sometimes it’s a choice and sometimes it’s fate. The weirder the collaboration the better.”

“Only You,” featuring Nelson, is a standout — soft, aching, and strange. “I remember meeting Tim and Cub Sport back in Brisbane way back, and we shared a joint after a gig I had played. The joint tasted like honey, I’ve never had a joint like that since. Anyway, when I was writing ‘Only You’ and I was staring at the ceiling, the song just burst out in a resentful moan. That demo seemed to speak to Tim when we sent it to him.”

At the other end of the album is “Wherever You Are,” a quiet, heart-wrenching closer with Vance Joy. “That song is probably 15 years old. It’s bittersweet for me when I reach way back into my song catalogue… they do become so personal. That song is written from a special time in my life, and for a special person from that time.”

Genreless by Nature

Collective Ecstasy moves through house, Balearic, funk, folk, and ambient like a fever dream — but the shape-shifting was never planned. “The genres follow the songs and the collaborators. We’re working with so many different people, and at so many different points in our lives, so we can’t help but have a variety of feelings and experiences in the music.”

Some songs are new, others go way back. “Whisper is very old, and Sunrise is new, so maybe there’s a metaphor in there you could draw out? But it would have been very hard to have consciously planned the last ten years, so I think any journey is entirely subconscious.”

The magic is in the layering — a decade’s worth of evolution captured in texture. “Imagine the album slow cooking for a decade. Old songs were recorded when we had a much rawer, DIY vision of music. When ‘Love Tonight’ was massive, we tried recording in Los Angeles and London with professional music hustlers. Then recently we’ve been having recording sessions in Melbourne that are completely self-indulgent. Over time, it has all matured into this densely textured album.”

Of course, Love Tonight still hangs in the air like a lingering echo — the kind of track that shifts a career overnight. “Haha, yes. If ‘Love Tonight’ hadn’t blown up, there would be no SHOUSE in 2025. Imagine a single thing you did, a single sculpture you made in a university class, or a short story you wrote in High School, suddenly becomes extremely successful. That is the starting point.”

Rather than outrun it, SHOUSE leaned in. The track became the foundation for a kind of trilogy: Love Tonight, Won’t Forget You, and most recently, Call My Name. All three follow the same communal architecture. “During the verses individual singers sing individual lines, and then everyone forms a choir to sing the chorus. It’s a metaphor, transforming the individual into the collective.”

And SHOUSE makes no apologies for repeating that form. “I love the power of a choir, but without understanding all the individuals it’s much harder to care. And I’m proud of this structure, so I don’t mind using it again and again and again. And again maybe?”

Dancing, Together

Despite the album’s spiritual roots in the club, some of its most powerful moments are introspective. “It’s wonderful to be able to release some songs like these two [‘Without You’ and ‘Think I’m Thinking’], because I agree they are more vulnerable and introspective. An album gives you the freedom to have slower, less intense songs.”

SHOUSE’s understanding of community goes beyond the DJ booth. “Most of my musical experience has not been in the dance world but instead in the folk world, or the rock and soul band world. These experiences are all about making music with other people, in the same room and with instruments and singing.”

But there’s something uniquely powerful about the dancefloor. “The dance world seems to exist for a different reason. It is communicating through music but the main form of expression is dancing. You communicate your love for community, for unity and for each other in your body. It’s very special, and very compelling.”

Now, with Collective Ecstasy out in the world, SHOUSE are ready to take it on the road. “We will tour with a band in 2026. We’ll do some DJ shows this year, and keep making music and having parties in our warehouse at home.”

And as for what SHOUSE even is now?

“‘Identity is a prison,’ I heard that on White Lotus, and I think it can be true. When ‘Love Tonight’ exploded, the song existed in many different ways… so there wasn’t any SHOUSE identity really. Now we have constructed an identity for SHOUSE, but it was very much in the DJ and dance world. The album can hopefully expand the possibilities for what our identity is.”

For a duo who accidentally found themselves at the centre of a global singalong, Collective Ecstasy is the sound of taking the long way home — through noise, through joy, through community — and finding something more meaningful than a hit: a reason to keep dancing.