Written by Siena Robb

There is something strangely beautiful about Bennetts Grove describing their new music as “making a vase out of scrap metal.”

It is an image that captures the contradictions at the heart of the Sydney post-punk outfit: industrial soundscapes made vulnerable, aggression interrupted by tenderness, and stories that find something intimate within paranoia, grief and uncertainty. Bennetts Grove have never sounded particularly interested in making darkness palatable. Increasingly, though, they seem interested in discovering what else can exist inside it.

That instinct sits at the centre of the band’s current chapter. After establishing themselves through their EP Through Bared Teeth, a growing reputation within Sydney’s live circuit and a sound indebted to the darker edges of post-punk and alternative rock, Bennetts Grove are now in the process of rolling out a project they regard as something more definitive, creatively and emotionally.

Its first three singles tell us plenty already. There is the fictional paranoia of “Out in the Cold”, the bruising romanticism of “Sternum”, and now, the existential introspection of “Foresight”. On paper, they occupy remarkably different emotional territories. Together, they reveal a band becoming increasingly comfortable with vulnerability without sacrificing the abrasion that made their music compelling in the first place.

Through Bared Teeth

Bennetts Grove emerged from Sydney’s alternative scene with a particularly physical interpretation of post-punk: brooding atmosphere colliding with driving rhythms, heavy guitars and an aggression that rarely feels disconnected from emotion. Their earliest releases, Mantle and Lobster, arrived in 2023 before both found a home on the band’s debut EP, Through Bared Teeth, the following March. The five-track project offered the first substantial introduction to their sound, placing the band somewhere between melancholy and confrontation.

The influences were discernible, Bennetts Grove themselves point towards artists including IDLES and Fontaines D.C. but the band were already beginning to find a language of their own. Then came Homeward Bound.

Created alongside fellow Eora band Belvedeer later in 2024, the collaborative three-track project was structured as a story across three acts. That project now feels particularly revealing.Storytelling has become increasingly important to Bennetts Grove. Their songs do not simply describe an emotion; they construct environments around it. A forest can become paranoia. A relationship can become something remembered only through hope. A question about people leaving a room can quietly become a question about death. By 2026, that instinct has been pushed further.

The band have spent the year unveiling a new seven-track EP, a project they describe as a love letter to post-punk and a clearer definition of what Bennetts Grove can be. It is intended to move between heavy industrial textures and delicate emotional melodies, allowing individual songs to inhabit their own worlds while remaining part of something larger.

If Through Bared Teeth introduced Bennetts Grove, this record appears interested in defining them. And its opening chapter begins somewhere cold.

Out in the Cold

“Out in the Cold “ is built like a nightmare that slowly realises it is one. The song follows someone stranded within a snowy forest, trying to find their way home as fear gradually gives way to paranoia. The longer the character remains lost, the less reliable their perception becomes. For vocalist Sam Ward, the fictional premise allowed Bennetts Grove to approach emotion from an unusual direction.

“For “Out in the Cold”, the emotion came through creativity,” he tells MAESI. “For the song, we wanted to write a fictional story, about a person lost in the forest.” “So by putting ourselves in the shoes of the character we could write about the emotions and thoughts that might go through one’s head in that situation.”

“We chose this title as it sets the scene before you start listening,” Sam explains. The band took particular inspiration from The Cure’s A Forest, borrowing not its story wholesale but its capacity to make landscape psychologically threatening. “A person is lost in a forest and begins to question their reality and slowly gives in to their paranoia.”

What begins as a physical journey therefore becomes something less tangible. The forest matters because of what happens inside the person walking through it. And Bennetts Grove allowed the instrumentation to participate in that collapse. “Musically speaking the instrumentation ends up influencing the overall mood of the song,” Oscar Braddy explains. “In “Out in the Cold”, we wanted to reflect that initial concept of paranoia throughout.”

“Narratively, however, the ending very much switches up the vibe and that certainly parallels the story of the song,” Oscar says. “All these elements definitely end up getting expanded upon within the production process.”

The approach has attracted attention beyond the band’s immediate circle. “Out in the Cold” landed on triple j Unearthed earlier this year, while Bennetts Grove continued building the live reputation that has seen them share stages with artists including Protomartyr, Radio Free Alice and Shady Nasty. Yet “Out in the Cold” is only one extreme of the emotional spectrum Bennetts Grove wanted to explore. The next single turned towards something considerably more intimate.

Somewhere beneath the sternum

If “Out in the Cold” finds emotion by inventing a character, “Sternum” strips much of that distance away.

Built around lost hope and the strange process by which loss eventually begins to transform into something else, the song is less interested in a dramatic breakup than in what remains afterwards. It considers a relationship that has ceased to exist physically but continues to survive through memory, longing and the smallest possibility of reconciliation. Musically, Bennetts Grove allows that feeling to accumulate. Rather than forcing heartbreak into a neat resolution, “Sternum” lets it expand.

The response has been striking. triple j’s Sarah O’Keefe compared the song to the strongest moments of Protomartyr’s The Agent Intellect, a particularly fitting comparison for a band that has already shared a stage with the Detroit post-punk outfit.

But “Sternum” also illuminates something about Bennetts Grove that comparisons alone cannot. For all their industrial weight, they keep reaching for softness. Oscar describes it as a kind of internal rule. “If there’s a shadowy and dark sort of vibe going on, we really like to push it to its limit,” he says.“In saying that, though, whenever we do something dark we always like to sprinkle a little bit of sweetness in there. Something light, and vice versa! A sort of Yin and Yang thing, I guess.”

It is perhaps the closest thing Bennetts Grove has to a manifesto.Push the darkness until it nearly overwhelms the song. Then find something beautiful inside it.

A journey inward

That tension reaches somewhere different again on “Foresight”. Where “Out in the Cold” invents an extraordinary scenario, “Foresight” begins with an almost painfully ordinary question: “Why is everybody leaving?”

“I think it sets the imagery for the song,” Sam says. “I often think this song could be a story of a person sitting alone in a park at night, perhaps after a party, alone and with their thoughts.”

It is easy to picture. A gathering has ended. People have gone home. Someone remains behind in the strange quiet that follows, suddenly left with thoughts that noise and company had previously kept away. But the people leaving are not necessarily just leaving a party.

“As the song is about the contemplation of whether an afterlife exists, it could also be a metaphor for how everyone will one day die,” Sam explains. 

Crucially, “Foresight” does not treat that realisation as nihilistic.

“It’s delivered in a way that’s not remorseful, more in a way of appreciating that you have little time with the people you love, effectively cherishing it.”

Death becomes less a destination than a lens through which to consider life.

For Sam, that makes “Foresight” fundamentally different from the fictional construction of “Out in the Cold”, “"Foresight” started off as a natural spiel of thoughts,” he says. “I feel like this song really did capture some heavy emotions naturally from its subject matter…I like to think that both of these songs tell a story from opposite ends on the emotional scale…they are both narrative focused and read like thoughts or strings of consciousness coming from a person in specific situations.”

“Whilst “Out in the Cold” is an extreme story of a person who is lost in a snowy forest, whose fear starts to get the better of them, “Foresight” is conversation with oneself…one is a journey outward and one is a journey inward, though they are both a journey into the unknown.”

It is difficult to find a better description of this period of Bennetts Grove. A forest becomes impossible to navigate. A relationship ends but refuses to disappear. A person sits alone and wonders whether there is anything waiting beyond death.The band rarely answers the questions it raises. That is intentional.

Leaving space for uncertainty

“I particularly love ambiguity in lyrics,” Sam says. “I believe leaving things up to interpretation is a very impactful practice in songwriting.”

For Bennetts Grove, ambiguity does not mean withholding meaning. It means accepting that meaning can change.

“The listener may only understand certain phrases on their 10th or 20th listen,” Sam continues, “…possibly giving the listener a different view on the song over time.”

It explains why even the band’s most narrative-driven work avoids becoming overly prescriptive.

“Out in the Cold” may have a protagonist and a forest, but the fear underneath it remains recognisable. “Foresight” may contemplate an afterlife, but it does not tell its audience what to believe about one. Even the distinction between fiction and autobiography begins to dissolve during the writing process.

Although “Out in the Cold” started as an exercise in storytelling, Sam found something personal inevitably creeping into it.

“Naturally, writing from the perspective of a character, your own emotions leak in,” he says, “…which made OITC feel more sentimental as we wrote it.”

The invented character becomes a vehicle for something genuine.

With “Foresight”, the process is reversed: genuine thoughts become something listeners can inhabit as their own. Production becomes another way of constructing that ambiguity.

“…we added these eerie sort-of delayed/reverb guitar noises you can hear littered throughout the verses and instrumental sections that we thought complemented the song’s concept,” Oscar explains.

Bennetts Grove’s music has always contained noise, but increasingly that noise feels purposeful. Texture becomes narrative. A guitar can destabilise a scene. An arrangement can tell the listener how a character feels without requiring the lyric to say it. And the process of discovering how far those ideas can be pushed has apparently taught Bennetts Grove something about themselves.

“I think these two songs in particular gave us a lot of insight into how we work together,” Oscar says, “and actually how far we could emotionally and narratively lean into a song.”

There is a sense throughout this new material that Bennetts Grove are testing exactly that limit. Not how heavy they can become. How vulnerable.

Making something delicate from something heavy

Perhaps that is why “making a vase out of scrap metal” feels like such an appropriate image for this record. A vase and scrap metal are not natural companions. One suggests delicacy, the other weight. One exists to hold something living; the other is what remains after something has been discarded. Bennetts Grove seem fascinated by that contradiction.

Their forthcoming releases position industrial soundscapes beside emotional melodies, heavy riffs against more ethereal passages. Their songwriting follows the same logic. Paranoia can contain sentimentality. Mortality can produce gratitude. Heartbreak can still contain hope. Even within the band, those opposing instincts appear simultaneously. Oscar points towards “Foresight”, where harsh guitar stabs from Sunny Capron and Mia Betteridge sit alongside his own more rhythmic playing. The point is not to choose between beauty and abrasion. It is to make them dependent on one another. That balance has developed over several years of releases and an increasingly active presence in Sydney’s post-punk community.

Through Bared Teeth established the foundations. “Homeward Bound” pushed their interest in narrative. Their current run of singles now feels like the point where those instincts are beginning to converge. There are signs that audiences are following them there.

Alongside its Unearthed support, “Sternum” has received national radio attention, while the band’s live calendar has continued to grow from local headline shows into support slots for established acts and releases of their own. But if Bennetts Grove are becoming more serious about the worlds they construct, that does not mean those worlds always survive contact with an audience intact. Sometimes, listeners hear something entirely different.

Trapped in the swizzer

Once a song leaves its creators, control over its meaning becomes somewhat theoretical. Bennetts Grove learned that through “Out in the Cold”.

“Yeah, there was a pretty funny one actually,” Oscar says when asked whether a listener has ever interpreted their music in an unexpected way.

There is a moment in the song where Sam sings about being trapped in a “winter wonderland”. Some people did not hear that. They heard: I’m trapped in the swizzer.

“None of us has any clue as to what a swizzer is,” Oscar says, “but it definitely gave us a good laugh, so much so that it’s become a part of our vocabulary.”

The misheard lyric has now escaped the track altogether.

“If Sam’s feeling a bit cheeky, he’ll say it during rehearsal. Sometimes a gig.”

It is a wonderfully quirky footnote to a song about psychological collapse. It is also, accidentally, an extension of Bennetts Grove’s own philosophy. They can compose the music, establish the character and carefully decide exactly how much of the narrative they want to reveal. But the moment somebody else hears the song, it becomes something slightly different. For a band increasingly interested in ambiguity, perhaps there is no more appropriate outcome.

Bennetts Grove’s new material exists in those unstable spaces: between aggression and tenderness, character and songwriter, fear and comfort, knowing and not knowing.Across Out in the Cold, Sternum and Foresight, they are not simply building towards another release. They are beginning to articulate what Bennetts Grove sounds like when every part of the band: its heaviness, vulnerability, storytelling and restraint is allowed to exist at once.