‘Being On The Inside And Pushing Out, Wanting To Escape, To Grow’: Platonic Sex Talk Debut Album ‘Face To The Flywire’

When casting your mind back to an Australian childhood, you probably remember the sounds of magpie chirping, the dust caught hanging in the rays of the sun coming through on an early morning before school. 

Outside, the birds rest on an idling hills hoist, and there’s a thin layer of mist that renews the grassy backyard outside for another day of after-school shenanigans.

You’re in your bedroom, watching it all happen; Face To The Flywire. 

When Platonic Sex frontperson Bridget ‘Brando’ Brandolini recalls the moment the title phrase came to them, they picture their childhood bedroom in the quiet New South Wales town of Clunes. 

“The words ‘face to the flywire’ are really special to me,” Brando shares. “They represent a feeling of being on the inside and pushing out, wanting to escape, to grow.” That sense of straining against the mesh – of holding intimacy and longing at once – became the album’s conceptual anchor, one that runs through its lyrics, textures, and production choices.

Their bedroom is the same safe space that Brando returns to often, both metaphorically and physically. Before calling in to speak with The Music, they had trekked from Brisbane back to their mum’s house in Northern Rivers to help her pack up the fine china before relocating, packing away a semblance of their old life and the upcoming album’s lifeblood in the process. 

Now living in Brisbane, they still manage to return to that feeling often. “I think for me, Platonic Sex is kind of like my childhood bedroom in a sense that it’s a space I can be comfortable in and vulnerable in,” Brando says.

Ryan Hammermeister – one quarter of the band and a fellow founding member – stops by to chat as well, sitting in a living room back in Brisbane, drum sticks in hand as though we’re all propped up on his snare and about to get a front row seat to some tunes. 

Ryan and Brando started Platonic Sex in their uni salad days back in 2020, and alongside a solidified cast – including multi-instrumentalist Jane Milroy and decorated bass session player Jess Cameron – the band has gone on rapid success, both holding title as one of the core bands on the Brisbane gigging circuit and as touring pros alongside the likes of Angel Olsen, WAAX, and The Beths. 

As of 2025, they’ve reached new heights, kicking the year off with a nod from the QLD Music Awards as finalists for ‘Best Rock Song’. But it was recognition from the QMAs two years prior that really established the need for Platonic Sex in the music zeitgeist; the band won the coveted Carol Lloyd Award, boosting them amongst past winners such as Hope D and Sahara Beck. 

While the award’s generous bursary provided new possibilities “to either record a full-length album or record and tour an EP”, it was the validation that really kicked the concept of an album into conception. 

If the band’s live presence radiates a communal kind of joy, their debut album turns that energy inward. Face To The Flywire doesn’t feel like a fresh start so much as a diary finally laid bare, pieced together from years of scribbles, scraps, and unfinished songs that have been waiting for their moment. 

With its release just days away, the band describes the wait. “It’s like we’re on an airplane taking off,” Hammermeister says. “We’re just waiting for the seatbelt sign to go off so we can float.” That hovering between tension and release — suspended, but with momentum building beneath — hums through the record.

Pieces of the album stretch all the way back to adolescence. The title track borrows a chord progression from Brando’s dad, a refrain that filled their childhood home in Clunes. The bridge of Easy revives words written in a teenage notebook.

Even the textures are steeped in memory: voice memos of storms and birdsong captured in Brisbane sharehouses are woven into the soundscape. “Personal roots shaped the entire album,” Brando explains. “Personal roots is the album.”

That inward pull has shifted Platonic Sex’s songwriting into a different register. Early tracks like Devil’s Advocate struck outward, skewering sexist microaggressions with cartoonish bite, their antagonists shrunk down into punchlines. While previously able to play offence, the four-piece let their guard down on the debut album, welcoming us into a whole new level of vulnerability. 

The first impression of the album is a somatic one. The body awakens, remembering the score in the pit of your stomach as the lull of opener Over It floods the ear canals. While Brando described the headspace of this project as a childhood bedroom, suddenly you’re transported back to your own—all afternoon skies, and a yearning for something you can’t quite describe yet.

“I'm so excited to hear what people's initial reaction to the first track is going to be like,” Hammermeister admits. “I always found with albums that, when you enter an album, you think, ‘Oh my god, I'm here for the ride,’ you know? And the first track, I remember we wrote it on Minjerribah, or I just remember Brando and Jane playing it to me then.

“Well, it came to life there,” Brando adds. “It wasn't even really a song at that point, it was just like that guitar part [...] and that was all that there was. And I was just making up lyrics and Ryan was voice-memoing it, and we'd been on the writing trip, but it was like the end of the day.”

“Yeah, and it was called Kentucky Love before Over It,” Hammermeister adds, before the two ricochet chuckles off of each other. They try to remember if the placeholder title had origins tied to cowboy caricature or a famous fried chicken brand – a far cry between the initial joke of it all and the deeply serious end product. 

Ryan circles back to the beginning of his story: “I'm so keen for people to listen to it because it is such a different sound and there's no drums in it, but I feel like a big part of [the arrangement] as well, because it's an ambient kind of track and it's just very world-building.” 

Fever Dream is another notable track due for release as a tenet of the album, one that the band both describe as “underrated.”

“It's also again like, like another song where people think of like Plat Sex and they go like, ‘Woah, what the fuck?’” Hammermeister says, referring to the genre expansion on the song. 

Endearingly referring to their bandmate as ‘Ry’, Brando advises fans to pay attention to an unmissable percussive fill ad-libbed by him in the track. “Every time I hear it, I just think of it like a human doing a horse trot. If you listen to the album later, you'll know exactly the one that I'm talking about.”

And then there’s the hidden gem Step Back, a '90s-influenced piece that’s both endearing and anxiety-ridden. “Step Back is so like the unsung hero of the album,” Brando states. 

While the labour of creating this specific track required tedious culling compared to “pulling teeth,” the polished song is regarded as having one of the best bridges on the album, and the band can’t help but admire the Jane of it all. 

“This song has heaps of Jane singing and Jane lyrics and like Jane-isms in it. It's so fun for that,” they explain. Platonic Sex are a generous band when it comes to platonic love.

It’s the same platonic love that wafts into the crowds that surround them, be it on a behemoth of a stage at Laneway Festival, or in the carpark of their local community radio station 4ZZZ. 

A week after our first chat, they’re out gigging again. This time it’s in a crossover of celebrations for BIGSOUND and 4ZZZ, both of which the band are alumni of. They chug through home-grown favourites like Disappoint Another and Easy, disproving the former while making it look like the latter. 

A crowd fills the space up to the curb of St Paul’s Terrace, but it’s still intimate enough to feel like you’re being personally serenaded by Fenders and falsetto. 

A local photographer is snapping away on a film camera. He talks of how he’s seen the band numerous times, pulling out an album on his phone to show the progression of hairstyles and life phases of the band over their years on stage. 

Like many Brisbane music people, he talks about them and their friends of friends on a first-name basis, gushing about a particular photo he took post-gig of one of the members and their long-term partner. The couple are captured in a vignette; It’s one of his favourite shots.

That sense of familiarity is signature to Brisbane’s music scene; someone always knows someone. 

And bands always know other bands, especially when they share members. For Platonic Sex, members have toured – both in or overlapped with – the likes of Melaleuca, LY-OH, Callum Pask Trio, Hope D, Children Collide, and Beckah Amani. Even former Platonic Sex member Mikki Hain shared time in Perve Endings, who in turn shared members with Radium Dolls, and so on. 

“It feels like we’ve grown up inside this scene,” Brando reflects. “There’s always been this sense of people looking out for each other.” 

The band are especially reciprocal towards beloved 4ZZZ, both on and off the stage. “I love 4ZZZ so much,” says Brando. “They've been so awesome. Not just supportive, just so encouraging. I find them to be very motivational for us as a band.”

Hammermeister zones back into that carpark gig. He reflects fondly on an interaction with the station’s manager, having received a compliment on a gig from three years ago. “

They'll just say that out loud,” he says of 4ZZZ’s team. “It really makes you feel seen in the music industry, and there's a lot of times where you're fighting to be seen, and 4ZZZ are seeking you out to see you.”

That bond makes their place on 4ZZZ’s 50th birthday lineup even more meaningful. Later this month, they’ll share the stage with Regurgitator, The Saints, and Tropical Fuck Storm in a celebration of the station’s half-century of radical broadcasting.

That closeness extended all the way into the studio: Platonic Sex recorded with Ball Park Music’s Sam Cromack at his Fortitude Valley space, Prawn Studios, and spoke with the same warmth about the experience as they did about the 4ZZZ community.

Alongside recording their own album, they also recently supported Ball Park Music on an Australian tour. “They were like, gentle parenting us,” Hammermeister recalls. “And they’d offer to transport our gear back to the hotel.” 

“They were exactly how we want to be as a band,” Brando adds. “We’d only played the Brunswick and Gold Coast legs, but by that point they’d played ten shows and they were still so up and motivated.”

Even with Face To The Flywire finally airborne, Platonic Sex are already imagining new ways to stretch its wings. Talk turns quickly to the launch, which switches a live show for more of a listening party vibe, including a gallery and tables for attendees to contribute their own collages. 

“All the artists that have contributed to the visuals in some way are having a display of stuff,” Brando explains. “So, there’s jewellers for the music videos that are coming out. The jewellery that we wore in videos is going to be in it, and there's this custom shirt that these two local designers collaborated on that I wear in all the music videos, even though the music videos aren't out yet.”

There are also murmurs of alternate recordings, of songs stripped back and rebuilt, and said music videos that will carry the album’s imagery further, one of which may or may not take place in Brisbane’s Old Museum grounds. 

Then, almost as an afterthought, the band hints at a headline tour — the chance to let the songs mutate onstage, as alive and unpredictable as the people who scream them back. “Yeah, but let's just tease,” Hammermeister grins. “That's it, for now.”

Platonic Sex’s debut album, Face To The Flywire, is out Friday, September 19th.