“Some bands make the best shit in the beginning, but I feel like we’re the opposite,” laughs Melissa Scaduto, co-founder of LA-based trio Sextile. Sextile are currently amidst a nearly two-month tour, playing the biggest rooms of their career as support for Sacred Bones labelmates Molchat Doma, which will have the two electronics-heavy post-punk acts at Franklin Music Hall next Wednesday, February 12th. I recently got a chance to chat with Melissa and fellow Sextile co-founder Brady Keehn from the road, where they’re telling me about the band’s second go-round (Following two LPs and an EP, they went on hiatus in 2019, before reuniting in early 2022.)
“They seem to be more into it this time around. People’s responses have been more excited than the first time around, and we’re more excited than the first time around,” says Melissa, who jokes that COVID streaming practices may be responsible for much of this excitement: “People discovered us after we broke up [laughs].” Regardless of the reasons behind Sextile’s new wave of fandom (Brady mentions a significant increase in US listeners.), both Melissa and Brady seem thrilled with Sextile’s current state, with Melissa noting that it’s the first time the band ever got paid to play shows and Brady telling me, “I feel like we’re a whole new band, almost as if we started over… I feel like the first two records were almost demo records.”
September of 2023 saw the release of Push, Sextile’s third full-length and first for Sacred Bones (home of phriends of PHILTHY like Anika, Marissa Nadler, Indigo Sparke, Uniform, and many, many more). “I just saw that they’re releasing a new Anika record!” Melissa says when I ask about Sextile’s current home. She also mentions one particular album from the label’s catalogue that holds a very special place in her heart: “Lust for Youth – International, which is a record that came out like 10 years ago, is one of the best records of the past 10 years, and I’m surprised that they didn’t get bigger. It’s perfect from start to finish. They’re like our modern New Order; I love them!”
“It’s crass but also hugely enjoyable at its best, plonking you somewhere between a sweaty rave dance floor and a boisterous mosh pit in a grungy New York club,” Beats Per Minute wrote of Push. And the band tells me that crowds on this tour have been loving their recent sounds as well: “The audience always really responds to it, and our fans are there!” “We’re playing what we consider all bangers,” Melissa tells me of Sextile’s current live set. The band actually already have plenty of post-Push music, with their follow-up LP set to drop May 2nd, whose songs are making up half of their setlist. “We wanted to present the vision we see of Sextile now,” they explain of the decision to include the abundance of unreleased songs.
In a recent YouTube chat for MusicFiends.com, Brady admits that, compared to past releases, the new Sextile album is both harder and faster, “but also softer, at the same time,” even including the band’s first-ever country song… So, I have to ask about that… “There was a country song I wrote. I wrote a lot of country songs, but they were only ever for me. But I love country,” says Melissa, going on to explain that there is, indeed, a country song that closes out the album that she wrote based on a state-run nursing facility she found herself in after a bad accident. Although she tells me that the finished product is a little more complex than one might assume: “It’s really an ambient, pretty song. A lot of people are like, ‘It kinda sounds like The Velvet Underground,’ but it’s written like a country song.”
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