As career strategies go, it didn’t seem like the kind guaranteed to lead to instant celebrity status. After spending the early part of his life obsessed with old-school trance music, Sydney, Australia, native Harley Streten changed gears in his late teens. The beatmaker, who performs under the name Flume, decided to dial things back, producing songs that would have fit in wonderfully on a late ’90s mix tape between Play-era Moby and Finnish electro alchemists Pepe Deluxé. While seemingly not the smartest strategy today, when big-beat monsters like Skrillex and deadmau5 rule the EDM landscape, Streten has managed to surprise everyone, including himself.

Flume’s eponymous debut album has gone platinum in Australia since its release last November, turning the 21-year-old into a star Down Under, where he’s now an in-demand quantity on both the club and festival circuit.

“I never saw any of this coming—not at all,” the easygoing Streten says, on the line from SXSW, where he’s launching an assault on America. “In fact, it was quite the opposite. I was convinced that I was never going to make any money off this. I wasn’t even sure that people would like the stuff that I was doing, because it’s a bit different than what people are into these days. I don’t want to blow my own trumpet, but it’s quite different. So the way that it’s taken off has been quite crazy for me.”

That Flume has been an out-of-the-box hit doesn’t seem crazy at all when you consider the producer does a seamless job of re-creating an era he wasn’t old enough to enjoy the first time around. The album’s 15 tracks find Streten mixing and matching genres with an admirable fluidity. The songs draw on everything from honey-dipped hip-hop (“On Top”) to space-station prog (“Ezra”) to ghostly Afro-pop (“More Than You Thought”).

Ultimately, Flume is a throwback record that capitalizes on the idea that, sooner or later, everything old becomes cool and hot again, whether it be flannel-flying grunge, golden-era college rock, or first-wave hardcore. The usual way of thinking is that it takes 20 years or so for the nostalgia cycle to kick in. By tapping into electronica’s late ’90s chart-crashing years, Streten has managed to get ahead of the curve. Cleverly, though, he’s put his own spin on things; whereas those who inspired him often built songs on samples pillaged from old records, Flume hasn’t. So despite what you hear on field-blues-injected songs like “Holdin On”, he isn’t taking the crate-digging, Alan Lomax route.

“ ‘Holdin On’ is the one [paid] vocal sample on the whole record,” Streten notes. “I worked around that one vocal, which was a lot of fun. Everything else is me writing the music, and then having a vocalist come in. What you hear on a lot of the album, where there’s that kind of high-pitchy, chipmunk-y kind of vibe, are royalty-free sample packs of happy-hardcore vocals that are sped down to half-time.”

The process of assembling the songs on Flume was, he notes, relatively easy, which is all the more impressive when you consider how polished the album sounds. Streten—who grew up playing saxophone, but never in conventional bands—attributes this partly to the musical education he received as a kid. Albums from all parts of the record store were in constant rotation at home, giving him a great grounding in all genres. So while early trance was one of his first major loves (this was at age nine, thanks to a neighbour who didn’t believe in closing the windows when the stereo was blaring), his iPod doesn’t start with Paul van Dyk and end with Armin van Buuren.

“After the early trance, I really got into French electro, Moby, and M83,” Streten says. “Also, my parents played me a lot of stuff like Deep Forest, which was really kind of world music. Lately, the big thing for me has been really weird stuff, things like the Flying Lotus.”

The goal with Flume was to draw from all his influences without sounding like any one of them.

“I knew that I didn’t want the record to be pigeonholed,” Streten says. “If you’re going to start out writing a record, by the time you’re finished, no matter what genre you’re working in—dance or whatever—it’s going to have been done before. I didn’t want anyone to be able to put a quick label on it—that was a conscious thing. Apart from that, there wasn’t much science behind it, to be honest. I just wrote what I was feeling, and what sounded good to me at the time. I wasn’t intentionally trying to push any boundaries. If it sounds that way, great.”

So while the late ’90s might be a good starting point for getting a handle on Flume, the Aussie breakout artist is having no problem connecting with kids who are looking for the next big thing, even if we’re still five or six years away from the electronica-nostalgia stars truly aligning.

“I played this festival called Splendour in the Grass,” Streten recalls. “I’d never really played a festival before, and ended up with a super-early slot. But there ended up being a huge amount of people there to see me. The entire place was full, literally thousands and thousands of people. When I looked out and saw all them singing along to songs that I’d made in my bedroom, that’s when I realized this shit was getting serious.”