‘LOVE WAS A STRANGER’
STREAM HERE | WATCH VIDEO
OUT NOW INDEPENDENTLY
UK & EU TOUR BEGINS NEXT MONTH
Fresh off a chart-topping second album, sold-out national tour and one of the biggest independent singles in recent memory, Keli Holiday – the solo project of Peking Duk’s Adam Hyde – returns with new highway–ready ‘Love Was A Stranger’, out today. Holiday will be playing Glasgow and Leeds this November – buy tickets HERE.
Written in the wake of Capital Fiction’s runaway success, ‘Love Was A Stranger’ marks the beginning of a new chapter for Keli Holiday and finds him turning the lens outward – a song about what it means to lead with love when the world seems programmed for the opposite. Sonically, it’s pure Australiana with a classic rock heart. A driving beat and a streak of alt-country twang carry the track, while Keli’s gravelly vocal sits on a sultry, rolling groove. Big-hearted and built for singing back, it has all the makings of a future pub anthem.
Speaking on the single, Keli Holiday shares: “This is an expression in response to my experiences since releasing Capital Fiction. The good, the bad, the ugly, and the beautifully stupid. It is about masculinity, sure, but ultimately it represents the fact that we fear the unknown and today it feels like love is a stranger more than ever. Hate seems to be the default gear online. If we all got to know what we are longing for a little better, I think we’d find ourselves smiling at the sky instead of chasing dopamine on a screen. It’s about meeting everything thrown at you with love. It ain’t easy and it ain’t complete, but the journey itself is something to share through the vessel of a song that feels like cruising down a highway at 3am with the desert wind in your hair.”
The track arrives with a music video directed by Isaac Brown. “To me, the song is about owning who you are in the face of judgement,” says Brown. “We wanted to take that idea and make it physical, so Keli finds himself in this strange little world where people are literally taking aim at a target made in his image. The guns become a fairly direct metaphor for being targeted for the man you are and the artist you choose to be. There’s something interesting in the tension between being yourself and the pressure to make yourself more palatable to other people. Even with a target on his back, Keli meets that hostility with love rather than fear.”
WATCH THE VIDEO HERE
“Love Was A Stranger” follows a run that few Australian artists have matched in recent memory. Capital Fiction debuted at #1 on the ARIA Australian Albums Chart. Peking Duk’s Paradise also arrived at #1, making Adam Hyde only the second Australian artist in history to score two #1 albums in a single calendar year across two separate projects. Lead single ‘Dancing2′ became a genuine phenomenon: it hit #1 on the ARIA Singles Chart on its way to Platinum certification, landed at #2 in triple j’s Hottest 100 as the highest-placing Australian song (alongside two further Keli Holiday entries), and became the #1 most viral sound on TikTok. The track topped Spotify’s Viral chart in Australia, New Zealand and Ireland, reached #2 in the UK, and has racked up over 700 million views across social platforms.
Along the way, ‘Dancing2′ picked up the ARIA Award for Best Video in 2025 and has been nominated for ARIA Song of the Year in 2026. Keli Holiday took out Rolling Stone’s Readers’ Choice Award, and the track spent months at #1 on the AIR Independent Singles Chart, with support from Greg James on BBC Radio 1 and Novena Carmel on KCRW.
Born out of the creative stagnation of the pandemic in 2021, Keli Holiday became Hyde’s escape – a space for heartbreak, sonic exploration and reinvention beyond the multi-platinum, ARIA Award-winning success of Peking Duk. But it’s in a heaving, sweat-soaked room that the project truly comes alive. Having sold out shows in every Australian capital city on the Capital Fiction tour, Keli Holiday took the album to rooms across North America, the UK and Ireland. As Hyde puts it: “I will be releasing Keli Holiday albums until the day I drop dead.”
‘LOVE WAS A STRANGER’ IS OUT NOW
BUY/STREAM HERE
WATCH THE VIDEO
KELI HOLIDAY LIVE
10 November – Melkweg, Amsterdam
11 November – La Mécanique Ondulatoire, Paris
12 November – King Tuts Wah Wah Hut, Glasgow
15 November- Headrow House, Leeds
