From Ashes To New waited a long time to make it to Australia.
Having finally broken that drought at Good Things Festival in 2024, the Pennsylvania outfit apparently had no intention of waiting quite so long for round two.
At least, that was the plan.
“We were talking initially that we were coming back in 2025,” vocalist Matt Brandyberry tells us ahead of the band’s first Australian headline tour this October.
“That was the idea. Everyone was like, ‘Man, you guys crushed the Good Things. I think you’re going to do really well here. This is going to be phenomenal. We’re going to get you back here ASAP.’ And then it didn’t happen.”
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Even 2026 briefly appeared uncertain.
“We were talking about 2026, and it looked like it was going to happen. And then it looked like it wasn’t,” Brandyberry says. “It actually looked a lot like it wasn’t going to happen. It looked like we weren’t going to come this year. And it kind of all fell into place very last minute, and here we are.”
From Ashes To New will return for four headline shows beginning at Sydney’s Factory Theatre on October 9th, before Melbourne, Adelaide and Brisbane, with Banks Arcade joining them across the run.
For a band that had never played Australia before December 2024, it’s been a rapid progression.
“We didn’t know what to expect,” Brandyberry says of that first visit. “You go to a new place, new city, even in the U.S., you don’t know what to expect. But when you’re going to a country you’ve never been to before, you have no idea.”
Whatever expectations the band brought with them were quickly dismantled.
“Each city in Australia, every city that we went to when we were down there, completely blew our expectations way out of the water, man,” he says.
“And it’s happening now too with this headline tour. The whole thing is going to be sold out. So that’s another – it’s like, wow. Outside of playing some sideshows and playing Good Things Fest, we’ve never done anything down there, and to come down and do your first headline tour, regardless of whatever room you’re playing in, and selling it out is just sick, man. There’s no other word for it. It’s just so sick.”
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‘Where Has The Concert-Goer Etiquette Gone?’
The Australian dates arrive during an eventful period for From Ashes To New.
Earlier this month, footage circulated online of vocalist Danny Case angrily confronting an audience member who had repeatedly sprayed the band with a water gun during a performance.
Brandyberry was standing on stage when it happened – and says the clips that subsequently spread online didn’t tell the entire story.
“It was a less than ideal situation, and then it ended up going viral,” he says.
“I got shot in the face with it a couple times, hit me directly in the eye, went in my mouth at one point, and I didn’t know what it was.”
Brandyberry says Case had already identified the person responsible and told them to stop before the confrontation captured in the widely shared footage.
“I guess Danny had spotted the person. He had told him to stop, which there’s a video of that that of course didn’t circulate with everything else, but there was a video of him telling that person. He went up and he’s like, ‘Enough, knock it off,’ and then they just kept going and going and going.”
Watching it unfold in real time, even Brandyberry initially wasn’t sure what was happening.
“My first instinct was to kind of be like a mediator, but I’m typically, weirdly enough, the one that freaks out on people,” he says. “I’m the vocal one on stage in those types of scenarios.
“I was like, ‘Damn, y’all got Danny real mad,’ because he’s typically not this guy.”
Brandyberry says the episode points towards a broader problem facing artists onstage.
“Where has the concert-goer etiquette gone?” he asks.
“Is Danny such an evil person for freaking out? It’s like, how many times has someone said in their life, ‘I’m going to f*** you up if you keep doing this to me,’ and it hasn’t escalated past that?”
Brandyberry is adamant the situation was never going to become physical.
“It wasn’t going to turn into any type of physical altercation. But it was a situation where Danny was on his last straw, and he made sure that that person was super aware of it.”
And if anyone was wondering, he isn’t fundamentally opposed to water guns.
“I’m not gonna shy away from a planned water gun battle,” he laughs. “If we all want to get some Super Soakers together and go out and have a water gun battle, we can bring water balloons and water grenades and whatever you want. I’m down. Let’s go, man.
“I’ll even go as far as to paintball with you. I don’t know if you’ve ever been shot with a paintball, but they don’t feel good. But I’ll play. I don’t want to be hit with those things on stage while I’m trying to do something, trying to focus on doing something else, and I don’t think that that’s too much to ask.”
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Ninja Turtles, Kmart And Coming Back To Australia
Spend enough time talking with Brandyberry and things can veer in unexpected directions.
Before we’d even properly started the interview, a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles display behind me sparked an extensive discussion about which member of From Ashes To New corresponds to which Turtle.
Brandyberry? Leonardo.
“Although I’m more the Leo of my band,” he explains, despite Donatello being his childhood favourite.
“Danny’s Raph because he’s got the anger, and then Maty is Mikey because he’s the party guy.”
Guitarist Lance Dowdle gets Donatello, while the band’s newest member, Jimmy Bennett, landed a role Brandyberry arguably wanted even more.
“We weren’t going to make him Master Splinter because he’s the youngest of the band,” he laughs. “So we made him Casey Jones, and I was so insanely jealous that he got to be Casey Jones, man. Like, you get to be the coolest freaking guy in all of Ninja Turtles universe.”
Australia also provided Brandyberry with another blast from his childhood during the band’s first visit, although probably not one Tourism Australia will be adding to its next international campaign.
Kmart.
“There’s no Kmart here anymore,” he says of the United States. “I worked at Kmart when I was a teenager. So when we came down there and it was like, ‘Kmart!’”
“The dumb things just make me so excited. So it was just like, to see Kmart again in the flesh. I’m like, ‘Oh man, look at this! Australia still has Kmart.’”
Those strange little memories now sit alongside something considerably bigger: the realisation that From Ashes To New have found an audience on the other side of the world.
The band formed in 2013, and Brandyberry admits that more than a decade of experience has inevitably changed how he approaches what he does.
“If any of us humans were given the opportunity to go back with the knowledge that we have now and do something a little bit differently, I think we would,” he says.
“If I could go back to 2013 when I started it and do what I’m doing now, back then, yeah, I think I would do that because we would – I mean, we’d be untouchable right now.”
Australia is considerably closer than 2013, after almost missing this year entirely, From Ashes To New will finally be back in a little over two weeks.
From Ashes To New Australian Tour 2026
With special guests Banks Arcade
- Friday, October 9th – Sydney, Factory Theatre
- Sunday, October 11th – Melbourne, 170 Russell
- Tuesday, October 13th – Adelaide, Lion Arts Factory
- Thursday, October 15th – Brisbane, The Triffid
Tickets are on sale now via Destroy All Lines.
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