In two short years, American duo sace6 have brought monochromatic romanticisation loudly into the 21st century.
Forming in 2024 in America’s Northeast, sace6 began life as a solo project for vocalist Sace before expanding to bring in guitarist and producer Noah Thomas, solidifying the duo’s long-time creative partnership and igniting a dichotomy that exists between genre veils without posturing or gate-keeping.
Whether you adhere to their labels as “Deftonescore”, “baddiecore”, alternative metal-meets-R&B, pop or one of the many others doing the rounds, the pair’s heavy yet melodic tendencies are equal parts reflective, immersive and atmospheric; instantly unique and recognisable, but gleefully without gimmick or confinements.
Currently poised to release their anticipated debut album brutalist on May 8th via Sumerian Records, sace6 are also ticking off yet another first this month, with their debut Australian performances set to wow crowds, supporting nothing, nowhere. nationally in Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, and Perth in April.
For sace6, the upcoming tour is not only a chance to tour together and connect with fans on the other side of the world, it’s also a resounding reminder for the depth of local talent that resonates well beyond our shores.
“I don’t think there’s a better place to play,” shares Noah Thomas over Zoom. “I mean, Australia has just been one of the big stomping grounds for such a fast-paced and changing genre. Everything we love comes out of Australia, music-wise. So to bring what we do there is really, really cool.”
“I’m excited to see it for the first time,” adds Sace. “I’ve always wanted to go to Australia, and I definitely think this is the one audience I’ve really wanted to play for and to show our music to. And a lot of great bands do come from Australia, it’ll be really cool to play some stages that they’ve played and in front of crowds they’ve built. We’re very excited.”
Love Music?
Get your daily dose of metal, rock, indie, pop, and everything else in between.
Tone Deaf: Australia is a long way to come for most international bands, and obviously tour life doesn’t always lend itself to sightseeing and being a tourist. What is one thing each of you that would love to do while you’re here, time permitting?
Noah: I have been there before, not with sace6, but I feel like I got it all out of the way last time.
Sace: Yeah, you already got to do it!
You can be the tour guide Noah?
Noah: When I went there last time, we went through every possible touring band tourist attraction. So honestly this time, I just want to go to downtown Perth and hang out. I want to go to Victoria Square in Adelaide again. There’s a pie shop in Adelaide that I really want to go to, and I also just want to hang out in Batman Park in Melbourne.
What do you think Sace should do for his first ever visit?
Sace: I really want to go to the beach, but I don’t know if I’ll have time for that.
Noah: We might go to Bondi if we have time!
It is actually nice beach weather at the moment so fingers crossed. Your live shows are renowned for being immersive, the term “must see” has definitely been something I’ve seen frequently associated with your performances. Setlist-wise, what can fans expect from the Aussie shows this April, especially since you now have some newer songs to add into the mix from your upcoming album?
Sace: Yeah, I definitely think people should expect some new songs, and the same rules apply as what you touched on there, our show is emotional honesty on stage. And it allows people to resonate with it in a certain way, and maybe in a way it might not when you’re listening on Spotify or something like that.
Noah: I think our live show brings out a different attitude in the music. A lot of the songs can get very emotionally intensive or even soft, but we don’t play soft. We play very, very hard and I like the duality of it.
There’s something very special about seeing a band live for the first time and then instantly wanting to go back and revisit their music, it can take on a whole new lease of life after a live experience.
Noah: That is definitely our thing. And we play hard, that is one thing that will never change.
View this post on Instagram
You kicked off the year performing with Don Broco in the US, and after these Aussie shows you’ll also be supporting Dayseeker along with some Australian heavy favourites, Northlane. What’s a song that you’ve just been absolutely loving playing live, whether it’s an older song or something new taken from brutalist?
Noah: I think “ego” right now is my favourite. More specifically to me, a lot of our guitar parts have weird fluctuations between all of these pitch shifting effects that I have to start tap dancing on my pedal board for.
But I found a really locked-in rhythm with “ego”, I have my whole performance planned out in my head before we play that song. I just feel ultra locked in with that one, which means I can also just enjoy it. I don’t have to worry about doing all the extra stuff. That one’s never leaving my head!
Sace: I’d say “ego” for me too, vocally. I just feel like the verses are such a chill moment, and when we play it live I can just have fun and do things I didn’t do on the record, swap things a little bit and make it fun. And with the hooks, it’s such a fun part of my range to sing in. We’re just both so locked in on that song.
On the topic of brutalist, it’s definitely a sumptuous journey. We go from moody and sensually sharp with “besotted” through to bangers like “reverie”, and big anthemic moments on “allured”. I could go on, but to me it’s multi-faceted and genre defiance in the best possible way. I personally love not being able to pigeonhole a band, and you guys do it so seamlessly.
Noah: Our whole thing was that we both love pop music, we both love heavy music, but we want to be the ones to really truthfully blend the genres. Our backgrounds in music are so diverse. I worked in rap and R&B for the longest time, and me and Sace made different kinds of music together before we started making metalcore or pop or anything together. We really wanted to be the ones to dig our heels in and be absolutely unidentifiable.
That’s why we always refer to our music as pop music because we want to change the narrative on what popular music is now. Pop music wasn’t a genre for the longest time, it used to just be what was actually popular. We want to bring that back. We don’t want a certain sound attached to us. We have our sound, but we don’t want other people’s sound displaced onto us. We want to bring our own thing into the world.
Sace: For me, it’s less about genre-blending and it’s more about putting them against each other to force them to coexist. And I think that separates it a lot too because the parts of our music that are so poppy? They hold their own weight.
And then the heavy element that is brutal, hence the name of the album brutalist, it’s like a brutal element sprinkled on top of it that just creates something that ears just haven’t heard yet. And I think that’s special.
It is truly special, it takes you by surprise but in a unique and non-jarring way. And it’s clearly organic and cohesive.
Noah: It definitely comes naturally to us. And when we say heavy, we don’t mean “heavy” as in Lorna Shore heavy. We’re talking emotionally heavy. We want our music to feel crushing, that’s the heavy aspect of it.
Sace: And devastating.
With such an expansive sonic vision throughout the album, I’m curious to know for both of you, what music or artists did you personally grow up listening to, and what, if any, creative influences helped to shape the end result of brutalist?
Noah: Northlane would be one for me. Going out with them touring, that’s the craziest thing ever too. That band’s one of my all-time favourites. Volumes as well, Sace can attest to that.
Sace: Yes.
Noah: Definitely another one of our all-time favourites.
Sace: My favourite band of all time is Issues, obviously. But I think growing up, my ears were very much on both ends of the spectrum, it was like one ear was leaning towards R&B and pop, almost that trap R&B thing that happened between 2013 to 2015.
And then on the other side of it I grew up listening to post hardcore. Early Bring Me the Horizon was one of my favourite bands, and they still are one of my favourite bands. Sleeping With Sirens and Pierce The Veil as well.
On the R&B side of things, it’s very much SZA, Justin Bieber, Chris Brown, Kehlani, Fetty Wap, all of it. It’s just blending and mashing those two together and being like: “Work, work!”
You touched on the heavy emotional element with your music just before, and without revealing everything about the album ahead of time, what do you both ultimately hope a listener takes home from listening to brutalist?
Noah: For me personally, I want people to listen to this album and hear it as one thing, not just songs individually. I want them to take this album and digest it as one whole piece of art, not as different scattered songs in between.
I feel like today it’s so easy to pick apart, be like “what’s your favourite song?”. We want to bring back putting a piece of art into the world, not just a collection of songs, and pushing away from all the attention that you get off a single song. Albums are timeless for a reason. It’s a piece of you that you’re offering to the world and we want it to be digested.
Sace: Listening to it as an album all the way through, I feel like each track almost takes you through a different feeling of the same emotion. And I want you to almost pretend you’re on a rollercoaster and finish the ride out. Don’t just stop midway, take every feeling as it comes to you and digest it that way.
View this post on Instagram
You guys mentioned earlier how much you love Australian bands, Northlane is obviously a favourite we can throw into a list here. But in terms of other Australian artists, who are some Aussie musical crushes on your radar?
Noah: Oh dude, I’ve got a whole list. Northlane.
Sace: Parkway Drive.
Noah: Thornhill, Friends of Friends, Ocean Sleeper, Pincer+, Heavensgate… I could pull up my Spotify and we could talk here all day about Australia.
Sace: And shout out to The Veronicas!
Noah: Yes, The Veronicas! We’re biased because we have so many friends that are in Australia. Alpha Wolf!
Sace: Hell yeah.
Noah: The list is never-ending. We’ve got homies in Ocean Grove, we have homies in Thornhill. Ocean Sleeper are like family to us. Pincer+, family. Angel Season, family. And shout out Void of Vision too. We’re Aussie fans!
I feel like we could bring sace6 out a million times at this rate and just have you keep touring with Australian bands so we can keep having you perform here more often.
Sace: Let’s just do that!
Noah: Yes, we would absolutely do that.
In honour of your first ever Australian shows coming up, can you take me back to the first official performance you guys did as sace6?
Noah: It was Ceremony, right?
Sace: The first show as a band? No, it was that show we did with BSD and Garzi…
Noah: Oh, it was that show?
Sace: With Point North too, that was the first show officially.
Noah: It was the Thanksgiving one.
Sace: Yeah, it was a Thanksgiving show, The West Coast Feast. It was BSD, shout out BSD, Point North, Garzi and us. And it was nuts, the energy was crazy. We’ve been playing together on a stage for the past, what, four years?
Noah: Yeah. Actually funny enough, the only show before we became a band that I wasn’t part of, I was in Australia at that time!
Sace: Yeah, that show was with Static Dress.
View this post on Instagram
An awesome Australian connection in its own right. And to close us out today, to contrast your first ever performance with a more recent one, what is one recent live moment you will never forget?
Noah: Honestly, it would be Denver on the first leg of the Don Broco tour. That first show, I was holding back tears the entire set. I don’t know why, but the energy of that set was higher than a lot of other shows. Oh god, Atlanta too on Don Broco was also insane.
Sace: That’s what I was gonna say!
Noah: For three shows I almost sobbed every single time. And for our headliner in LA, I was fighting tears the entire time. If the energy’s high enough, I will be choking on stage.
Sace: I feel like we have a lot of these moments. Madrid with jxdn was definitely a crazy one for us too. Just the energy of all these people in the room that we didn’t think knew who we were, and then the crowd just loses their mind over it.
I don’t know, it’s just so cool to be so far away from home and have people know your music. That’s always such a special thing. But for me, the most special moments on stage are when me and Noah can just look at each other and play our instruments, sing and whatnot, and just recognise where we are and how we got here. We just have those moments where we look at each other on stage. And when that happens, that’s a memorable night.
sace6’s brutalist is due out May 8th.
nothing, nowhere. Return Of The Reaper Australian Tour 2026
With special guests sace6
Ticket information available via destroyalllines.com
Thursday, April 16th
The Triffid, Brisbane QLD
Saturday, April 18th
Factory Theatre, Sydney NSW
Sunday, April 19th
170 Russell, Melbourne VIC
Wednesday, April 22nd
Lion Arts Factory, Adelaide SA
Thursday, April 23rd
Magnet House, Perth WA
