Sex Mask are fuelled by spontaneity

If the Bandcamp release date is true, their infectious first single “How to Be Cool at Parties” quietly dropped first thing in 2023, and it best encapsulates them: an arresting monologue of critiquing riddles from a speaker craving connection, while its urgent and mesmeric backdrop makes their magnetic performance infinitely more expansive. The questions that arise afterwards and the pace never letting up are sustained in the band’s subsequent singles, as their digital discography grows from the mere 12 or so minutes it was just a year ago.

Even from the beginning, when they were playing Melbourne’s live circuit, they already had enough material in the tank to stretch their shows between 45 minutes and an hour. It’s not unreasonable to believe they had everything planned out, but as their vocalist Wry Gray discloses, that way of thinking couldn’t be further from the truth.

Gray formed Sex Mask as a duo with drummer and producer Vicente Moncada in 2022. They knew each other in high school but hadn’t seen one another for 10 years. Both Queensland natives, Moncada moved into Gray’s place in Melbourne once he kicked out his previous housemates. Then, they played catch-up, just like old friends do. “I was showing him what I was working on, and he was showing me some things that he was working on,” Gray says. “We tried to meet in the middle in a few different ways, and banged out a few demos.” Of those were the previously mentioned “How to Be Cool at Parties” and similarly thrilling “TV Movie”, which they put out on a whim.

Gray then recalls: “A few months later, I got a call from Vinnie being like, ‘Have you paid someone to listen to our music?’” Their streaming numbers shot up, supposedly after the algorithm took hold, so Sex Mask instantly went from nothing to something. “We were like, ‘We should probably get ready to play now that people are actually listening,’” Gray says, at which point he reached out to guitarist Kaya Martin, whom he met through a friend at a party, to become a trio. If it were entirely in their hands, more songs would’ve been out there and not live exclusives, for now. If the “logistics” Martin cites weren’t delaying their constant itch to put stuff out, perhaps they’d go about it the way Gray, coming from SoundCloud, would: “I fucking like this, I’m just going to put this the fuck out.”

The undeliberate scarcity then, which could lend itself to developing a mystique in some eyes, shouldn’t be perceived as such, given Gray’s delicate opposition. “I think I’m just relatively different, or peculiar, maybe in a negative way,” he explains. “I don’t think it’s super intentional, but I do like to not say too much. What could be considered vagueness is not always that. I like things being open enough that my protection is still there.” Gray’s words, taken from his archive of years of solitary writing – abstract interrogations of living and everything that comes with it – give their raw musicianship an alluring dimension. “The music should speak for itself; the things we make should speak for themselves,” Martin says. Gray concurs: “Depending on who you are and how you see things, [the lyrics] might be vague to you. They aren’t so vague to me.”

It’s clear Gray’s lengthy stream-of-consciousness musings he feeds into Sex Mask also come from a personal place, where they’re not solely ideas or thoughts he wants to capture as honestly as possible. Their open-ended song meanings shield him from having to disclose his truths. But he also fascinatingly puts faith in the audience – his listeners, and even people like me who write about the band’s songs. “Some people’s interpretations are richer and more detailed than anything I could articulate, and accurate to what I was going for,” he explains. “You give people that respect and wiggle room of, ‘I’m not going to spell it out for you, I’m going to give you enough that I think is necessary for you to do for yourself,’ and when there’s people who can do that, I’m fucking impressed.” Particularly for Martin, making music surprisingly becomes more than putting it out to be heard – it turns into a dialogue with the audience. “You make it and maybe come from a certain place, and they interpret it in a slightly different way as a back-and-forth relationship.”

Another tidbit of the band’s inner workings, largely provided by Gray as the songwriter, is that while their songs come together incredibly quickly, their origins require a lot of life lived. “You’re writing a lot, but then you get to a point of exhaustion where you’re like, ‘I need to go out and live to get more paint on the palette to write for,’” he says. The diaristic nature of his words almost becomes a mission to navigate his own life: “I don’t write journals; [Sex Mask] is me checking in with myself.” Where the others come in, particularly Moncada as the sound architect, is by taking Gray’s fragments suspended in different periods of time and recontextualising them into something new.

Talking directly to Gray, Martin says, “You pull from an archive of all this stuff you’ve written over the course of your life; it comes together in a song, and Vinnie will chop it up and change it. When we actually go to learn the song and play it live, it’s almost a bit disjointed where the parts have fit together.” He interjects, confirming that method only “sometimes” comes to be.

“Whatever is the best idea is the priority. As much as I might get sentimental about certain lyrics or poems that I’ve written and now they’re all Franksteined and fucking sashimi’d up, everyone needs to make sacrifices. There needs to be a clear line of order between who does what, and respect for hearing out everyone’s opinions and perspectives.” He adds that the only time creating their caustic poetry no longer feels laborious is once they’ve gone from no song or lyrics to something tangible. “After that, you should be trying to capture some sort of good authentique vibe.”

All this fuss about the trio’s song formation process serves something greater: The Sex Mask live performance. Moncada batters the drums without missing a single beat, Martin shreds the guitar, and Wry, often with his tattooed chest exposed, unleashes his snarl into the microphone and commands the stage like a young Iggy Pop. They’ve quickly graduated from Melbourne’s post-punk scene, which Gray clarifies they never “rose out of,” since they simply started making music without knowing anybody in the scene. Today, they still open for each other’s gigs.

But Gray also divulges the breakdown of their audiences, revealing Australia has always sat behind England, America, and Germany since the public first latched onto them. Whether it’s the algorithm sweeping them up or the music itself – I’m more inclined towards the latter than he is – their international appeal has existed since the start. “That was a surprise to us,” Martin admits. “On our first overseas tour, it was pretty scary being in Amsterdam or Paris and being like, ‘People are gonna come see us?’ And people were there and knew the songs. It was so cool!” Gray succinctly shares the best thing about overseas shows, possibly referring to the occasional Melbourne crowd that notoriously stands as still as a statue: “They’re warmer receptions.”

So how did Gray settle on his uncompromising stage presence? He offers two explanations, one riddled with self-deprecation from a lifetime of seeking approval – “I’m the runt of my family, I try to make people laugh, I’m just a real fucking people pleaser, you know? Just like a butler; I bring a real kind of Alfred energy to the stage” – the other more earnest, where his demeanour compels his audience to escape from their daily lives briefly.

“I want people to come in, they’re working all week or doing whatever they do, and I want to tune their attention into something that’s not so conventional. On stage, it should be free of inhibition – everyone’s looking at you, but you’re relaxed in that. It’s not a nihilistic ‘I don’t give a fuck’ aggression, but it’s like, enjoy yourself, let go, and lose the inhibitions.”

Though that has to stay within reason, as Martin says, since they “react to the crowd too. Obviously, we’re doing it, but if the crowd sucks, we’ll tell them they suck. Again, it’s like a dialogue: how they behave is going to change how we behave, and vice versa.” Considering Gray singled out an audience member at their last Gold Coast gig who overstepped by putting their hands on his chest, they will raise their boundaries: “I’m more than a hunk of flesh. That may or may not be true.”

How Sex Mask next evolves is completely up to them, and it can end up in any direction. They’ve aimed not to put boundaries on themselves, and while they’ve honed in on a particular punk sound, the band have succeeded early on by staying loose and authentic. All that Gray wishes for is them to be embraced with positivity: “The cardinal sin: Don’t be bitter. Don’t bring any frustration with you.”