Experiencing Sex Mask live is all gas, no brakes. The band’s artsy, electric fusion of proto-post-punk and writhing no-wave cool leaves little room for breathing space – and not least of all because shirtless frontman Wry Gray will often find himself directly within the immediate peripheral of anyone close to the front.
The Melbourne band’s energy – for two-thirds of their number, at least – was bred on the local hardcore scene, where Gray and drummer Vinnie Moncada found early inspiration. “I saw Parkway Drive live at the local community centre when I was 12,” says Gray. “I’d grown up playing guitar up to that point – both my parents were singers in bands – but seeing that gave us something to aspire to as kids.”
Thousands of miles away, guitarist Kaya Martin found herself inspired by grassroots musical movements – stemming, essentially, from the notion that no one will do it for you. “I grew up in a small city called Victoria on Vancouver Island in Canada,” she explains. “There wasn’t a huge music scene, but I was always drawn to whatever small local shows were on. I’d only ever seen gigs in stadiums before that. Seeing it right in front of me like that made everything feel like way more of a possibility.”
Sex Mask formed in 2022, originally as the duo of Gray and Moncada. The pair went to high school together, bonding over their shared love of music, and began collaborating when they started living together. “Wry was doing this weird rap stuff, and I was making these weird post-punk instrumentals,” recalls Moncada. “One day, we decided to see what would happen if we put our solo things together. It all came together a lot more naturally than you might think – we weren’t aiming for anything in particular sound-wise. The beauty of it was that it wasn’t really planned at all. It’s just what Wry and I had.”
Before long, the duo had put out their debut single: The bristling, urgent ‘How To Be Cool At Parties’. It’s a song with a curious crossroads – too British to be The Strokes, too American to be The Fall, too rock for Sleaford Mods, too hip-hop for IDLES. It’s a song that proudly doesn’t fit in any particular pigeonhole – which, in turn, makes it the perfect introduction to Sex Mask.
“I wrote the lyrics to that in 2017, when I was living in Brisbane, in a complete stream of consciousness,” Gray says. “It was within the first handful of demos that we made together. It’s developed a lot since then. Landing on it felt like a real Eureka moment.” Moncada agrees: “I was really taken with the sharp, percussive way that Wry sings,” he says. “At the time, I’d been listening to a lot of Bloc Party and bands of that ilk – matching angular, sharp guitar lines with that drum-machine precision. I thought it would be really cool to take that and put Wry’s vocals up against something that was really fast and upbeat. It ended up suiting the track perfectly.”
The single also, tellingly, revealed a penchant for theology on Gray’s behalf: In its lyrics, he uses the imagery of seraphims and Leviathan as part of his seemingly endless flow. This reoccurs on April’s ‘Cerce’, where he dabbles in Greek mythology. Gray tells NME that his interest in the subject didn’t stem from school, nor a religious background, but rather, a cruel prank.
“When I was a kid, my brother convinced me the world was going to end in 2012,” he says – alluding to the superstitious belief about the year from the Mayan calendar that was ultimately proven to be untrue. “That sent me down a rabbit hole of Sumerian mythology, and I became really interested in things from a different angle.”
‘How To Be Cool At Parties’ garnered a smattering of attention locally, including from Martin, who had just moved from Canada to Australia and settled in Melbourne following the lifting of COVID travel restrictions. “I met Wry and Vinnie at a house party,” she says. “They told me they’d started a band, and I immediately wanted in – especially after I heard ‘…Parties’. A few months later, they hit me up out of the blue: ‘Hey, we have a show in three weeks; do you still want to be in our band?’”
It was at this juncture, with the line-up complete and the live show starting to take shape, that Sex Mask’s reputation began to precede itself. Between Gray’s prowling stage presence, coming off as Iggy Pop and Lil Peep’s lovechild, and the bolstered energy of Martin and Moncada driving the whole thing along, the best way to experience the band has been to get along to a gig – not least of all because, until today (June 18), they had all but five songs out, with a discography totalling some 13 minutes.
They were one of the buzz bands at Australian music industry conferences Bigsound and SXSW Sydney last year, and they’ve quickly accumulated support slots for acts such as Fat White Family, Fcukers and Big Special. More recently, the trio have made inroads abroad, getting bodies moving across the European festival circuit with appearances at The Great Escape – where NME hailed them as one of the best acts of the festival – Supersonic, Dot To Dot and Gold Sounds. What exactly makes Sex Mask so appealing as a live band? “It’s a different experience,” theorises Moncada.
“The way that the songs take formation live is different to how they are on the recordings, especially having the live drums and the guitars in your face. You want to give people something more three-dimensional and interactive, as well as something that people might not expect when they’re first hearing these songs.”
“So much of life is so predictable and calculated,” Martin adds. “It’s nice to be in a situation where you can really wear your emotions on your body. The things I love about live music are the elements of danger and surprise. Our shows have both.”
Sex Mask are back in Australia for now, playing a series of headlining shows across the country. It coincides with their latest release ‘No Love’, which the band began opening their shows with last year. It’s a hell of an opener, too: its churning guitar riff sounds like Rage Against The Machine’s ‘People Of The Sun’ if it were played by Andy Gill, while its shrill stabs of synthesiser instantly recall the electroclash movement of the early 2000s. “It was actually in that same batch of original demos that ‘…Parties’ was in,” says Gray. “The more we played it live, though, the more the recording changed.” The lyrics, meanwhile, were also unearthed from a years-old archive – which, rather than being embarrassed about, Gray has completely embraced for Sex Mask.
“I think it’s really insightful, on a personal level,” he says. “You have this power to go back in time, in a way; to pull things out from the depths of when you were 17, or when you were 20, or whenever, and really objectively reckon with it. I find, especially when you’re younger, you’re in this constant happy-sad binary: one minute it’s all “this is so fucking great,” the next it’s like, “this is all fucking shit.” When you sink into the depths of your emotive psyche, you can really surprise yourself. It’s like any sort of iconography, really; it’s paint you can paint with.” It’s a fitting analogy, really – Sex Mask are seemingly entirely unafraid of mess, and that’s part of what makes them such an intriguing, vital new band that you need to get on board with now.
Sex Mask’s ‘No Love’ is out now