Sex Mask are having sangrias in a "shitty airport bar" right now, which feels like the correct setting for a band whose whole thing is part feral charisma, part laser-cut focus. The Melbourne trio - vocalist/lyricist Wry Gray, drummer/producer Vicente "Vinnie" Moncada, and guitarist/synth player Kaya Martin - are on a UK/EU run supporting Radio Free Alice, and they've timed it perfectly: today they release their new EP 'Body Broker', along with a final pre-EP cut, 'Curse'.

Even if you've only just clocked their name in the last six months, Sex Mask have been moving fast. The early singles 'TV Movie', 'Cold' and 'Blisters' have done the kind of numbers and word-of-mouth rounds reserved for acts who sound like they're headed for bigger rooms, and their live show has already put them on bills with everyone from Fat White Family to Big Special, plus festival stops at Dot To Dot, The Great Escape, and SXSW Australia.

Still, they're getting their heads around the speed of it all. "Honestly, any time anyone comes to a show, I am still surprised," Kaya says.

That mix of disbelief and swagger sits right at the centre of Sex Mask's appeal. They're not the kind of band who arrive with a neatly laminated lore. Instead, they talk like people who've just stumbled out of a house party, said something that makes you snort-laugh, and then accidentally revealed something raw and true in the same breath.

Ask them to introduce themselves, and you get a portrait that's half comic strip, half mission statement. "Vinnie, he's the gadget guy. He deals with intel, security, etc. Wry is the shaman. He operates mostly in unconsciousness. Kaya is the Canadian oil magnate. Strictly business," Wry says.

It's obviously a bit, but it also tells you what you need to know: Sex Mask are a self-contained unit with distinct energies, and they've figured out how to let those energies collide in a way that's funny, volatile, and held together by trust.

Their routes into music are different enough to make the band feel like a real convergence, not a scene-assembly. Wry describes a kind of unavoidable pull. "Ever since I was a little boy, I just knew. I said I'm gonna grow up and yell at people for a living."

There's a competitive streak in there too: growing up around guitar-playing brothers, he decided he'd do it and do it better, "but in a slightly more wholesome way than that."

Vinnie's background is vivid in a different direction. His parents blasted "really sick music" around the house, "pumping fucking Prodigy CDs when I was really little," plus the Matrix soundtrack for good measure. If Sex Mask's songs can sound like they're built for some late-night, neon-lit chase sequence, that childhood input tracks.

Kaya grew up in Canada writing "bedroom poppy stuff," going to basement shows in high school because there wasn't much else happening in a small city. Then she moved to Melbourne, met Wry and Vinnie at a party, and essentially lied her way into the band. "I met these guys at a party and lied to them that I could play any instrument, so they let me in the band."

Melbourne turned out to be a useful melting pot for the three backgrounds. Wry came in with "more Soundcloud rap," Vinnie from "a more punky hardcore scene," and Kaya into both. "It worked out pretty good," she adds with the understatement of someone who knows he got away with something.

That cross-pollination is also how they locate themselves in Melbourne now. Kaya describes a city without a single lane: big techno currents, big guitar-band currents, and a set of newer acts who bridge the two, like NPCEDE and Dumbhead. "I see us as more in that vein," she says.

Sex Mask don't feel like a band who belong to a micro-genre so much as one who've welded multiple instincts together until they spark.

Wry's relationship with "scene" is more complicated. "Beyond Melbourne even, I feel like I've never really been in a community. I'm a solitary individual and a self-isolating person," he admits.

But touring is changing that. "Now we're meeting all these people, and they're welcoming us in. This is probably the only time it's ever really felt like that." The admission lands hard because it comes right next to the humour. It also helps explain why the live show feels so urgent: it's not just performance, it's connection being built in public.

So what's making this band connect so quickly? Wry's answer is purely Wry. "It's just our clicky nature. I'm just a bit of a fucking clickster. I wake up, I look in the mirror, I start clicking."

If you've heard a Sex Mask hook that sounds like it was engineered to snap your neck towards the stage, you can kind of hear what he means. There's a physicality to their songs: industrial churn, no-wave abrasion, absurdist punk angles, but always with a groove that drags you in before you realise you're already inside it.

The attention has followed that same pull, with people latching on quickly to the band's blend of menace, humour, and heart. But success, to them, still looks like something grounded. "To me, success is having a few beers with my boys. And that's one thing that'll never change," Kaya says.

Wry wants a stranger-level intimacy: "I want to be on a first-name basis with strangers."

Vinnie's ambition is refreshingly practical: "I want to get more free shit." Put it together, and you get a band who care about each other, crave a real audience bond, and still enjoy the ridiculous perks.

'Body Broker' arrives as the moment Sex Mask properly widen the frame. It follows their first EP's more explosive energy, but the band are clear that this one comes from a different internal weather system. "We've done the crazy shit, we've got that out of the way, so this one's a bit more introspective," Vinnie explains.

"The first EP was more reactive, and this one's a bit more reflective. The first one's like punching a hole through a wall, and this one's like 'Ah damn, I just punched a hole through this wall.'"

Wry puts it more bluntly, with the kind of gallows-poet clarity that threads through a lot of his writing. "It came from the bottom of my nasty little heart, and it's a diss album to my dad and everyone who's wronged me."

That explains the EP's emotional temperature. Even when the riffs lock in and the drums drive like a motor, there's an aftertaste of reckoning.

'Cold' introduced that sharper focus, and 'Blisters' pushed it into warmer, more wistful territory, especially with Noah Learmonth from Radio Free Alice adding vocals into the song's swell and break.

Then 'Curse' lands as a final statement before the full EP drop: reverb-soaked, groove-heavy, a muscular rhythm section under labyrinthine riffs that burst into a chorus where Wry and Kaya's voices tear past each other.

It's the sound of a band tightening the bolts on what they already do best, without losing any danger.

They don't only draw from music, either. Wry says "yes" when asked about non-musical influences, then name-checks Lloyd deMause's 'The History of Childhood'. "I found it very upsetting, and in order to disassociate, I made music."

Vinnie adds Fast and Furious to the canon. Wry counters with Pirates of the Caribbean: The Black Pearl, specifically "The Deppster's performance." Somewhere between trauma literature and blockbuster sprawl, you get the band's aesthetic: high-contrast feelings, speed, and a willingness to be a bit unhinged about it.

Offstage, they're equally full-spectrum. Wry lists fun as "dine and dash, 3-4 litres of nitrous, and the love of another." Kaya's into birdwatching, using an app on tour to scan and log what she sees. Vinnie builds cardboard forts for his daughter. The three activities paint a ridiculous but pretty tender triangle: mischief, attention, care.

If 2025 has been their ignition year, 2026 is clearly being framed as the reveal. "In 2026, fans will finally get a peek behind the Mask," Kaya says.

Wry follows with a single word that feels like a door opening: "Album." They say it's basically ready.

They're hoping for North America in spring, then back to the UK and Europe in summer. If the current tour is a victory lap for 'Body Broker', the next one sounds like a step into something bigger.

Their predictions for the year are as you'd expect from a band who treat sincerity and joke-making as one instrument. Kaya: "Yungblud is going to jail." Wry: "Big shoes are back."

Ask what they want first-time listeners to feel when they hit play in 2026, and Wry gives you a colour. "Turquoise." Bright, strange, oceanic, a little spiritual. Like Sex Mask themselves.

Right now, the band are on the road, EP out in the world, sold-out London show in the books and more rooms filling up behind it. They still sound a bit stunned that anyone's turning up, and also completely certain that what they're doing deserves the attention.

That tension is exactly why they feel so alive. Is there anything else people should know? Wry pauses, then adds the last piece of mythology you didn't know you needed: "We do birthdays." Consider yourself warned, and invited.