sace6 expected a lot more hate for their genre-smashing debut album, brutalist. They call it a pop record, but it’s unlike anything you’re going to hear on the charts with its mash-up of slinking R&B vocals, ferocious breakdowns and playfully outrageous guitar riffs.
“We weren’t trying to be rebellious, we just wanted to make music that we loved,” explains vocalist sace.
“We’re so confident in our tastes that if we think it’s fire, we know the right people will click with it,” adds guitarist Noah Thomas.
brutalist definitely clicked with the right people. Released through Sumerian Records in May, the album was met with a wave of praise from heavy-music outlets for its attention-grabbing mix of R&B intimacy and metallic aggression, expanding their audience and becoming the centerpiece of a packed touring year: Dayseeker support dates, their first U.S. headline run, shows with Chiodos and appearances at Warped Tour and Louder Than Life. The album may prove that sace6’s genre-splicing instincts were right, but they had already been following their gut for years.
The duo’s roots stretch across New York and New Jersey, and both sace and Thomas grew up on heavy music. sace would sing along to rock-radio classics in the car before discovering Sleeping With Sirens, Pierce the Veil and early Bring Me the Horizon. Thomas was a rock-obsessed kid whose world got a lot heavier after a trip to skate camp introduced him to Chelsea Grin and Asking Alexandria. “It was the greatest thing I’d ever heard in my life,” he says. Of course, he went home and started a band of his own.
Over the years, the pair’s listening tastes expanded to include the fun that flowed through generational radio hits from the Pussycat Dolls, Lady Gaga and Rihanna. sace got obsessed with R&B stars SZA and Kehlani while Thomas worked as an audio engineer at a rap studio and dabbled in hyperpop. “We’ve had our hands in a lot of genres,” says Thomas.
When sace and Thomas crossed paths in 2020, they bonded over that shared love of a little bit of everything. It wasn’t long before Thomas was helping produce sace’s very first solo songs. Those introspective emo tracks led to the singer forming sace6 as a band with Thomas. The duo would go on to tour with pop singer jxdn and, later, emo rapper nothing,nowhere.
During a visit to Amoeba Music after playing gigs across Europe, sace saw an album cover with two people on the front. “This could be us,” he told Thomas, who dropped his other touring commitments and happily signed up as a full-time member in 2024.
“Before that, it felt like we were always trying to write other people’s songs. It was more like cosplay than sace6,” says Thomas. But becoming an official unit made everything so much easier. “It kicked our asses into showing off what we could really do. We just started making music without anything in mind and created this entirely new sound.” Their first project written as a band was 2025’s moody pop-metal EP, Limerence.
This year’s brutalist expands on that polished, aggressive sonic palette. The band pulled from their forever inspirations — Sleep Token, Chase Atlantic, Cigarettes After Sex — but the two most influential records for their new songs were + där skogen sjunger under evighetens granar + by Swedish prog-metal titans Vildhjarta and the sugary pop excess of Tate McRae’s So Close to What.
The whole record was made in less than two months in their apartment. “It’s not a fancy bedroom studio either,” says Thomas. “We just had angst and determination.” The first two songs they wrote — “reverie” (which features a jxdn guest spot) and “ego” — felt like they belonged in the same world. “So we set about writing a soundtrack to it,” says sace. “And once we started, we couldn’t stop.” Take “nepenthe,” which was created in the 24 hours after they originally submitted the album.
sace took the same off-the-cuff approach to the lyrics. “I let them flow out of my body and there’s no intention to them,” he says. “I still don’t know what some of the songs are about.” Not worrying about telling a cohesive story meant he could focus on the raw emotion behind each track. “I definitely have struggled with feeling misunderstood, but using the microphone almost as therapy [gives you a place] to let it all out.”
“I think this album was written about all the worst things that have happened to us,” he adds, leaving the details unsaid.
“Yeah, I had a couple awful things happen in the middle of this album, and you can definitely tell,” agrees Thomas.
Focusing on emotion over neat storytelling also leaves plenty of space for the listener to find their own meaning. That’s why all the visuals are black and white, too. “It means they can paint their own canvas,” says sace, who hopes brutalist can offer some much-needed escapism. “You look at the world right now and there’s so much fucked-up shit going on. A show is enough for people to escape their reality for one evening, but building a world allows people to fully submerge themselves in what we’ve created.”
Ambition-wise, the duo want to take sace6 “to the moon.” There’s already talk of what comes next, with dark-pop maverick Ethel Cain’s name cropping up as a current influence.
“We’re still the same sad, angry kids that fell in love with heavy music, but we don’t want to be locked into the confines of one genre,” says Thomas. “You just have to be confident enough in your vision. I’m sure Lady Gaga and Linkin Park were told countless times how they were never going to make it, but look at them.
“I’m sure there are people saying that about us. But we’re not asking for notes.”