For Ocean Sleeper, success has never really arrived as one giant moment.
It has come in increments.
First, playing a show at all felt enormous, then Melbourne, interstate, overseas, sold out rooms, then writing sessions in Los Angeles and Portland, now global touring schedules barely leave enough room to unpack a suitcase.
Eleven years after the Gippsland metalcore band uploaded one of their first videos to YouTube, Ocean Sleeper are now staring down one of the biggest periods of their career.
Ocean Sleeper ‘Break The Cycle’ video
Their second album, Peace When I’m Dead, landed last Friday (August 28th). This week, they kick off their biggest Australian headline tour yet, with Brisbane already sold out and the remaining dates tracking strongly.
For guitarist and clean vocalist Ionei Heckenberg, the scale of it still feels slightly ridiculous.
“I’m just stoked. Just we’re all just so happy. Like we’re all just so grateful. I think I looked yesterday, and I think our first video we released on YouTube was 11 years ago. So the band’s been around for a minute.”
That long road matters.
Ocean Sleeper didn’t emerge from one of Australia’s established heavy music hubs, they came out of Gippsland, regional Victoria, an origin point that has shaped both the band’s work ethic and the way Heckenberg now sees their position within the scene.
“Massively, massively. One, it’s like cool. I don’t know. For us, it feels cool to come from an area that doesn’t really have much, I guess. So it’s fun. Like it’s it’s fun to be able to then be mentor or be an example for other youth that are coming from Gippsland or people coming from Gippsland that are doing music, because it’s not really a place very known for its music scene.”
The problems Ocean Sleeper face these days are different, as Heckenberg puts it, they have moved from fighting local limitations to confronting “global challenges”.
That evolution is all over Peace When I’m Dead.
Ocean Sleeper ‘Peace When I’m Dead’ video
Ocean Sleeper Refused To Stop Rewriting The Record
The album was assembled across Melbourne, Los Angeles and Portland, with the band working alongside producers including Jon Lundin, Curt Martin and Jeff Dunne.
But this was not a clean process where twelve songs were written, recorded and neatly boxed up, far from it.
Ocean Sleeper kept pulling the record apart until deadlines physically stopped them.
“We initially started writing the record here in Melbourne, and then we did a few weeks writing here. Then we had our headline US run and we’re like, sweet, how do we make this more of a thing? So we went there a week early, did a week in LA with John London from Point North and Kurt Martin.”
Following their US tour, they spent another two weeks working in Portland with Dunne before returning home, touring Europe and then realising the album still wasn’t finished.
“The title track, ‘Peace When I’m Dead’, was written in January, so that sort of gives you a good. That gives you a good example of like where where the record was at at the start of this year.”
Rather than treat the looming deadline as a signal to stop, Heckenberg and the band continued pushing.
“We weren’t like oh sick we got the record that’s done move on it was like how do we make the best record we can possible even given the time constraints, we were we were pushing it to the limit.”
At one point, the band were still trying to push the album from 12 tracks to 13 or even 14 while the deadline closed around them, not all of that material made it though.
Heckenberg says there is already enough unreleased material floating around to potentially revisit Peace When I’m Dead with a deluxe edition next year.
“Definitely, definitely. The dream for us is to do some form of deluxe next year. Hopefully, the record goes well enough to be able to do that, and we have got heaps of material that just never made like never made it to the final phase that we’ll go back through this year and sort of refine, do the whole ocean sleeper process and figure it out.”
That “Ocean Sleeper process” is basically controlled destruction, with songs getting finished, then edited, improved, tracked and then edited again.
Heckenberg points to ‘Promise’ as one of the clearest examples. The track was effectively complete, including Karl Spiessl’s vocals, when Heckenberg decided it still wasn’t enough.
“There’s a song on the record, Promise, that was for all intents and purposes fully finished. Everything was fully tracked. Carla just finished his vocals for it, and I was like, this needs something else. So I ended up, writing a whole new bridge for that song, which turned into this really cool guitar solo thing.”
Even after mixes had supposedly been completed, Ocean Sleeper were still revisiting them.
“It’s never done until I’ve clicked export and sent the the files off to Jeff, the guy that co-produced it.”
Perfectionism is probably the obvious word for it, Heckenberg doesn’t dodge that.
“Definitely, especially when it comes to our stuff, like it is a blessing and a curse because it means that the bar I set is really high. But sometimes that means stuff takes a really long time.”
The upside is that when Peace When I’m Dead finally landed, there were no songs left that the band considered filler.
Ocean Sleeper ‘My Forever Drug’ video
‘Those Feelings And Those Memories Never Go Away’
The detail obsessive production process sits beside something much messier emotionally.
Peace When I’m Dead deals heavily with grief, guilt, depression, regret and the feeling of being permanently at war with yourself.
For Heckenberg, those themes don’t simply disappear once the vocal take is finished.
“Massively better after it’s all done. It’s it’s really interesting, even like thematically with the songs and the lyrics. I know for me personally, I’ll think of the moments that I was writing about while I’m performing them live, so those feelings and those memories and stuff never go away for me, which is a really wonderful thing and also like a really hard thing sometimes if it’s something full on.”
That tension is central to Ocean Sleeper, the record carries ugly emotions, but the band’s relationship with performing those songs seems almost aggressively joyful.
Heckenberg describes Ocean Sleeper as “diehard musicians at heart”, Europe recently gave them a fairly convincing test of that claim.
“We just came back from Europe and that was possibly one of like the worst driving tours we’ve done because we had a we had a sleeper van that had no AC in a record heat wave in Europe.”
The solution?
“So we were sitting in the back on bags of ice with bags of peas on our head, like just grinning and bearing it.”
And somehow, they loved it.
“We all had so much fun doing that. You know what I mean? Like we all had a laugh, we all had jokes about it, and we all loved doing it.”
If sweating through a European heatwave inside a van with frozen vegetables on your head doesn’t kill your enthusiasm for touring, you probably chose the right career.
From Gippsland To Everywhere
The Australian Peace When I’m Dead tour begins this Friday in Sydney before Ocean Sleeper hit Brisbane, Perth, Adelaide and Melbourne.
Ocean Sleeper Australian Tour 2026
- Friday, September 4th – Sydney, Liberty Hall
- Saturday, September 5th – Brisbane, The Princess Theatre – SOLD OUT
- Thursday, September 10th – Perth, Magnet House
- Friday, September 11th – Adelaide, Hindley Street Music Hall
- Saturday, September 12th – Melbourne, Forum Melbourne
- October 22nd to October 25th – Hellbound Cruise Festival
Find out more and pick up your tickets here.
After this run? There is barely any downtime.
North America follows alongside Nevertel and Rivals, then Ocean Sleeper return to Australia and head straight onto Parkway Drive’s Hellbound cruise in October.
Europe comes next in January with Catch Your Breath.
More Australian dates are already being planned for 2027.
“It’s looking like a really exciting next year, which will be a whirlwind.”
That sounds understated considering how far the band has travelled since those early Gippsland days.
Asked whether he could have imagined any of this when Ocean Sleeper first started, Heckenberg doesn’t hesitate.
“Never, never. Yeah, yeah, never.”
He pauses, then comes back to the same thing that runs through most of the conversation, gratitude.
“Everything’s so surreal for us, and it just all comes like it all comes with such gratitude.”
Maybe that’s what happens when success arrives slowly enough that you remember every rung of the ladder, Ocean Sleeper aren’t behaving like a band that has finally made it and can relax.
They’re behaving like a band that has reached the position where they can push even harder.
‘Peace When I’m Dead’ Track List
- Every Part Of Me
- Break The Cycle
- My Forever Drug
- Peace When I’m Dead
- Punishment
- Someone Better
- Forgive
- Promise
- Taste
- Skin Deep
Listen here.
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