SANDPIT isn’t so much a song, as a monster; a three-and-a-half minute thrill ride that is somehow equal parts theatrical, simmering and brutal. It has slashing metallic moments, but this isn’t metal. Its dramatic piano introduction evokes a titanic operatic sensibility, but this isn’t opera either. This is rock as Rachmaninov would have played it.

It’s fitting then that this is how Melbourne 5-piece ROBOT CHILD has chosen to announce itself to the world. In the tradition of Queen, Pink Floyd, Faith No More and Muse, everything this band does is driven by big ambitions and grand ideas. Their debut album, ONE MORE WAR (out in 2014) is an 11-track interrogation of the seemingly endless human capacity for conflict, as though by reflex or routine. We fight as members of society, as partners in a relationship, a humans against our planet, as nations or empires. We use words, emotions, money, weapons. We do it for power, for control, for comfort, or even for reasons we don’t fully understand. But we fight – no matter how enlightened we imagine ourselves to be.

SANDPIT stands at the centre of this landscape. Are the playground conflicts we had over toys and status really so different from the horrors we inflict on each other as adults, or do the weapons merely become more inhuman? Do we ever really progress, or do we simply varnish our childish motives with self-deception? On paper, the lyric seems almost harmless, but Jeff Wortman’s vocal foreshadows something almost sinister, as do Martin Holt’s bass and Dan Slater’s drums which march relentlessly onward in lock-step. Only the ethereal piano and guitar work acts as decoration before the chorus explodes into a blaze of aggression. “Play with me,” belts Wortman, but it’s hardly a polite request.

By song’s end we’ve experienced everything from restraint to the uncontrolled onslaught of Russell Hodges’ colossal piano part beneath Waleed Aly’s wild, almost unhinged guitar solo. This journey is neatly captured by Matt Slater’s animated video, which accompanies SANDPIT’s release, and which you can view at: http://youtu.be/xwenAWX3s_A

Sandpit will be launched officially at The Evelyn on 22 December 2013. In the meantime, the band will indulge their theatrical sensibilities and respond to their social consciences in a side-project production of RENT with Nuworks Theatre, staged to raise money for AIDS orphans in Swaziland.