‘Instead of a bridge, we have a breakdown!’ Sace exclaims when both he and co-conspirator Noah Thomas are asked about sace6 musical style ahead of not only their upcoming Australian tour, but also new album launch on May 8 for Brutalist as Noah elaborates.
‘We want to reintroduce different types of music back into the mainstream and completely break down what is pop now. We have heavy, heavy guitars, heavy vocals, then beautiful soaring R&B vocals. All of these things that shouldn’t work but when you put them together in a hat and shake it around, you get us out of it. We really want to be the ones to completely break the walls down and just show people that pop music is not what it used to be. We have pop structure, pop melody, pop hooks, pop traditional pop drums. We just do things a little bit differently and we want people to show how proud we are of that!’
sace6 is the brainchild of Sace, and latterly Noah Thomas, into the musical fold combining pop, R&B, post hardcore and hefty dollop of metal. After the success of EP Limerence, the duo are about to release debut album Brutalist, a sonic representation of emotions from Besotted to Perfidy. The pair are quite the double act, Sace is softy spoken, reserved yet focused on his vision, Thomas the chatter box who brings the heavier musical contrast. The juxtaposition of personalities and influences meshing to create the bands unique sound, as Sace explains.
‘Growing up, I was super into R&B, specifically the 2013 to 2015 era of melodic trap R&B with the likes of Chris Brown, ‘Journals’ by Justin Bieber, Kehlani, Ciza, Fetty Wap. Then on the other ear, I feel like growing up for me was all super post-hardcore. Early Bring Me The Horizon, Sleeping With Sirens, Pierce The Veil. I feel like I’ve always been, as a vocalist, super R&B and pop forward in the way I like to sing and instrumentally and guitar-wise, Noah can name his influences, and it mashed us together.’
The debut album, Brutalist, is a journey of falling for someone, the joys followed by the lows of being betrayed and hurt. Each song title is a representation of not only the lyrical and poetic content, the sonics that create the emotion each title is about, Sace elaborates.
‘Each song conveys a different emotion and that’s what the names go for. The names being words that people may not have heard. I feel like it comes off of the tip of our last EP called ‘Limerance’, and that was a word that people were a little unfamiliar on, and then we kind of let them know the feeling of it and that it did have a word. All of these feelings that these songs convey, they do have names. They are also words for very specific feelings. It’s all about these feelings that you can’t describe, but there is something to describe it and it’s brutal hence the name.’
Song titles, with the textured musical soundscape, include Basorexia, Covet, Ego and Nepenthe. If you don’t know what the words mean, you soon will on first listen. Noah divulges that the writing process behind the complex emotions is improvised and inspired.
‘There is no real way that we write our music. It just happens. We don’t wake up and go, “We are going to make a new song today.” Either Sace will be sitting at the computer and he’ll make a sixteen bar idea and then send it my way, and then I’ll finish the instrumental, send him the song back and he’ll record it, or I’ll make it instrumental and send it to Sace and he’ll send me something back. It all happens very naturally throughout our normal day-to-day. You don’t go to the studio and experience something in a studio. You experience something in the normality of life. That’s where you feel your deepest feelings. Going to a traditional studio and working on these things kind of blocks your ability to feel these things as deeply as you do.’
‘We both have our home studio setups, and we could feel what we’re feeling at four in the morning and roll out of bed and get that feeling out onto something. That’s how all of our stuff happens. It happens the most naturally it could. Everything is in-house. We produce our own music; we mix our own music. We want it to be as us as it could possibly be. And that’s what’s proven to work best for us. It’s so much harder to pull emotion out of you when your intention is being convincing of that emotion. You don’t have to convince anyone when you are in it. You know what I mean? You can hear what we’re feeling because we’re actually feeling it as we’re doing it.’
The upcoming Australian tour is with nothing, nowhere, aka Joe Mulherin, another uber-talented in-house artist who handles his own work from start to finish. Noah takes the lead on this.
‘When we talk about things like that, it’s more about the similarities of how we work and talking about the relief of how much easier it is to do things yourself. Taking out equations like booking studio time, money, which is the biggest equation when it comes to creating. Funny enough, it’s not an issue for us because of our situation. We don’t have to spend a dime to do what we have to do, and he feels the same way about that.’
Sace adds,
‘We were fans before tour. I’ve been listening to Joe since maybe freshman year of high school. I grew up listening to nothing, nowhere, so it was very special to be able to share the stage with someone that you’ve looked up to for so long. Having those things we’ve known the whole time that he’s been so self-produced and he does everything himself. We took inspiration from that, obviously, and we love the idea of doing everything yourself. So, I feel like he definitely had a big part in that.’
Sace has not been down under however Noah has, ‘I’ve been to the big banana!’. Sace for his part wants ‘to see Kangaroos and koalas. I really would like to see a beach. I grew up into action sports, like scootering and skateboarding. So, if I get a glimpse of a skate park, I just want to watch for a sec!’. They have been well versed in how to pronounce our cities and the right things to say as we leave with this comment from Noah, ‘Melbourne is one of my favourite cities ever. I want an apartment above Batman Park!’
We all do Noah, we all do.
Interview By Iain McCallum
Pre-order brutalist at the link here which is out May 8 via Sumerian Records…
On tour with Nothing Nowhere, tickets from Destroy All Lines…
