Australian producer and songwriter Maxwell Byrne, aka 1tbsp, returns with ‘Wish You Luck’, a strange, tactile piece of dance music about consumerism and the rituals of modern life. The track, a collaboration with Vienna-based artist kid on air (Juanita Sohé Pereira Lillo), is built from clipped cycles, bright electronic textures and a chorus designed to break through the machinery around it. Here, 1tbsp turns the language of production into something catchy, physical and faintly unsettling. LISTEN HERE.

The song was written with Juanita at Villa Lala Studios in Vienna last summer. Byrne was immediately drawn to the mechanical quality of their writing: lyrics that loop and operate almost like components moving along a production line, somewhere between the toy-box machinery of Mouse on Mar’s ‘Gocard’, the playful precision of Flying Lotus’ ‘Putty Boy Strut’, and the hard-edged repetition of Kraftwerk’s ‘Metal on Metal’. That functionality became central to the track, and to a wider body of work Byrne is developing around these central themes. “I instantly loved how the lyrics felt very mechanical, kind of repetitive and functional like a factory,” Byrne says. “It really fit the themes I’m exploring in my next work.”

If the verses behave like machinery, the chorus is the rupture. Byrne wanted it to leap out of the track, recalling the blunt, ecstatic impact of Blur’s ‘Song 2’ – a song he first encountered as a child through the trailer for the 2004 Thunderbirds film. The memory has stayed with him for two decades, an oddly persistent piece of pop culture that now resurfaces in ‘Wish You Luck’.

There is something fitting about the reference. ‘Song 2’ is famously immediate: a few gestures, a sudden eruption, a hook engineered to lodge itself in the brain. ‘Wish You Luck’ takes a similarly economical approach, but places that instinct for repetition inside 1tbsp’s more elastic electronic world.

The accompanying video was filmed in Vienna a year after the song was written, with Byrne co-directing alongside Elif Gündüz, with styling by Alara Koçman and Pereira closely involved throughout. The result is a playful but slightly grotesque visual study of touch, contamination and the objects of everyday life.

The concept grew out of a conversation between Byrne and Gündüz about the heightened awareness of germs that followed COVID-19 – the small, involuntary rituals that have become embedded in ordinary life. Avoiding public surfaces. Holding your breath beside a bus or truck. The instinctive disgust of a dirty hand.

Watch: ‘Wish You Luck ft. kid on air’ (Official Music Video) 

That simple aversion becomes a visual language. The video follows the duo through Vienna in a deliberately small-scale production, turning the city itself into a kind of laboratory. Among its handmade props is a papier-mâché bar of soap, constructed by Byrne and Pereira the night before filming. The result feels less like a conventional dance video than a series of slightly absurd observations: a world in which cleanliness, consumption and performance begin to blur.

The video’s tactile quality mirrors the tension inside the song. ‘Wish You Luck’ is dance music interested in the systems surrounding dance music – the production line, the commodity, the repeated gesture, the image engineered to be consumed. But it remains playful rather than didactic. Its ideas arrive disguised as hooks.

For 1tbsp, that balance has become increasingly central. Since launching the project in 2021, Byrne has developed a deliberately open-ended approach to electronic music, drawing from house, reggaeton, synth-pop, techno and other fragments of global club culture. His productions have included collaborations with artists including Ninajirachi, Soltera and mietze conte.

The project grew out of Byrne’s earlier work as Golden Vessel, the alias under which he established himself as a songwriter and producer and earned a Grammy nomination (Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical for BAYNK’s Adolescence). 1tbsp began as an outlet for ideas that did not fit neatly within that project and has since become a substantial artistic world of its own. As 1tbsp, Byrne has also built an impressive festival resume in recent years, playing major festivals around the world including Laneway Festival, Groovin the Moo, Electric Forest, Portola, Shambala, Strawberry Fields and more, alongside sold-out headline shows around Australia, Europe and North America.

That world now extends beyond music. Through his independent production company and music label dottidot, Byrne has increasingly moved between music, film and visual work, treating each as another way of building and interrogating the environments around his songs. His debut short film, Sandtrap, was presented at Bolton Film Festival in 2025.

‘Wish You Luck’ arrives at a moment when those interests are converging: pop hooks and club mechanics, physical discomfort and digital influence, the banal rituals of consumer life and the strange pleasure of repeating them. It is, in other words, a song about the machine that knows exactly how to make you want something. And then asks you to dance.