Loud, Angry And Resolute: The Accidental Origins Of Npcede

Brothers Victor and Roy Moore have no interest in being in a band. Not another one, at least.

The Moores make up two-thirds of Melbourne/Naarm industrial punk and electronic outfit Npcede. Victor sings and plays guitar. Roy plays bass. Their childhood best friend, Zac Hellyer, plays keys and oversees the fleshy electronics of their songs.

“This is our first and only and probably will be our last band,” says Roy, the older sibling by two years, when The Music meets the Moores for coffee.

Npcede formed two and a half years ago. They released their debut EP through Chapter Music in May. The self-titled release is detailed and intense, taking in post-rock melodrama, pounding EBM and piercing noise. Every ingredient, from Victor Moore’s hysterical yelps to Hellyer’s industrial screeches, sounds like the product of painstaking effort.

The band’s official bio reads, “In a perfect world, Npcede wouldn’t exist,” which is both an amusing antidote to routine PR hype, as well as a nod to the ugly realities exposed by Npcede’s lyrics.

“Now we’re so fucking dim,” Victor announces in Spleen, the EP’s alt-rock and techno-adjacent lead single, released in January. The song laments how 21st-century conveniences have eroded basic intelligence and strangled original thought. “This era is cursed with diversion and surfeit,” Victor speak-sings in the song’s second verse, “where we don't get bored.”

Elsewhere, Victor’s lyrics convey the powder keg musings of an incel: “I’m obsessed with myself and upset no one else is,” he sings – or barks – in the punk-meets-gabber Swallow. “Goodness is drowned by my need to be noticed.”

But the band’s one-line bio is also not far from the truth, as Npcede essentially formed by accident. It was late 2022, and Victor and Roy were having a party at their sharehouse in Melbourne’s inner north. They wanted to DJ at the party, but they didn’t know how. Instead, they compiled a 40-minute mix of industrial techno on Logic Pro, adding effects to embellish the track transitions.

On the night of the party, they set up speakers and old DJ equipment in the kitchen. Roy stood over the mixer pretending to DJ, while Victor added tremolo guitar loops and occasional vocals. “We had a real focus on the performance of it. We really wanted to commit to it,” Roy says.

The performance was a hit – that is, until the power cable came loose from the DJ mixer. “When we got it back in, someone was like, ‘Just play from where you were up to,’” Roy says. “I was like, I have to scribble 35 minutes through; I can’t let them know that I can’t properly DJ.”

Eventually, the cops showed up, a testament to any good party, and the Moores were asked to do another quasi-DJ set at someone else’s party a few weeks later. Louis Avolo of Melbourne post-punk trio Boyfriend TV was at that party, and he was so impressed that he wanted to book the Moores for a gig he was organising.

“He posted us on Instagram, like, ‘Does anybody know who these guys are?’” Victor says.

Someone in the comments mentioned that they remembered the brothers from the first and only Australian gig by pioneering German EBM outfit D.A.F., which took place at Melbourne Town Hall in 2019. “We were there with our dad, who loves D.A.F.,” says Victor. “Apparently, we were being really obnoxious,” Roy says.

Avolo eventually tracked down the Moore brothers and asked them to play a show at the Thornbury Bowls Club in February 2023. “He was like, ‘Could you do the same set?’” Roy says. “At this stage, we were like, ‘Should we just make a band?’”

The Moores grew up surrounded by music. Their dad owned an old guitar, and as a teenager in thrall to Sigur Rós, Victor bought a cello bow to play it with – which he continues to do in Npcede. But, he says, “this was long before there was any thought about doing music seriously.”

Now that they’d been asked to play a proper gig, however, it was time to take music a bit more seriously. So, they reached out to Hellyer, who was living in Brighton, England. “It was like, ‘Look, we’re going to start a band,’” Roy says. “And he was like, ‘OK, I just bought tickets, I’m coming home. Let’s do this.’”

The newly formed Npcede had three months to prepare for the show. So, aided by Hellyer’s considerable command of Ableton, they spent the summer making loud, guitar-heavy music on the computer.

“The really early stuff was just taking two fun genres that we enjoyed in their own right and then jamming them together,��� Victor says.

They released a demo of Swallow in time for the show. “It was a simple kind of punk song,” says Victor. “I was listening to a bunch of Lobby Loyde at the time, so it was that really rock’n’roll, simple stuff. And then we just put gabber underneath it.”

The EP’s third track, Tabula Rasa, was influenced by minimalist composer Arvo Pärt’s composition of the same name. “We were just like, ‘How can we turn this into an industrial song?’” Roy says.

The band’s mash-it-together creative approach yielded six songs in time for the Thornbury Bowls Club gig, which was a sell-out. “It was so packed,” says Roy. “Too many people,” says Victor.

Npcede played the closing set, coming on after Boyfriend TV, Mouseatouille and bodies. As it turned out, bodies had invited a bunch of record labels to the gig, including Guy Blackman and Ben O’Connor of Chapter Music.

“They came up to us afterwards and were like, ‘Can we get your number?’ And we were like, ‘Cool, I guess this is just what being in a band’s like,’” Victor laughs. 

With Chapter’s support, Npcede played their third-ever show at the 900-capacity Croxton Bandroom supporting CLAMM in April 2023. Npcede were ultimately the last new act added to the Chapter Music roster before the label stopped releasing new music in June.

“It was really fun putting out a debut record by a brand new band as one of our last releases,” says Blackman. “Most labels would only do that if they were thinking they’d be capitalising on the next one. We’re like, let’s just do this because we’re really blown away by this band.”

O’Connor describes Npcede’s first gig as a “jaw-dropping, incredibly overwhelming and exciting experience.” And this intensity is what explains the band members’ disinterest in forming any other projects.

“Everything is in this band,” says Roy.

Npcede’s debut EP is out now. You can support them on Bandcamp and follow them on Instagram.