“I enjoy talking about myself,” Sidney Phillips says, her wide grin growing until she can’t stifle her giggles. “I don’t know if that’s bad or good.”
Ask anyone who has followed Phillips over the past five years and they’ll tell you that her proclivity for talking has been an enormous net good. Alongside her stealthyn00b collective,1 the Melbourne-based, Morayfield-raised rapper has reshaped Australian underground rap in her image, helping make a dormant scene into an electrified, pluggnb-charged subculture turning heads the world over.
When Phillips joins me over Zoom, we’re just over a week out from the release of her new album C**T (out now). The release of a new Sidney Phillips album doesn’t usually come with this much fanfare, given how often they happen (six albums in five years), but this one feels different. Working with Tabloid Recordings, C**T is the first album Phillips has released with a proper rollout and team behind it.
“I reckon there’s been excitement,” she says. “I’ve never gotten so much attention on singles leading up to the album before this one.”
The rapid rate of releases has led to a dichotomous rise for Sidney Phillips: in some ways, she’s arrived like a lightning bolt — taking her first steps as an artist in 2021 and yet already a totemic scene-shifting force — but her industrious output repudiates any notion that Phillips is some kind of overnight success.
The project itself serves as a coronation, an introduction and an experiment, all in one. Calling your highest-profile album yet C**T is, to put it delicately, a considered risk, but it’s unapologetically Sidney Phillips. She uses the word like punctuation and in many contours, telling me non-exhaustively, “you can be a sick cunt, or a dumb cunt, or a shit cunt”.
“It’s got layers because it’s Australian, obviously, it’s provocative and punky,” she says of the album title. “It’s also LGBT as well, because you know people are saying ‘oh, that’s so cunt’ and all that.”
In that sense, it’s also a distillation of what Sidney Phillips so distinct: she is a punk, in spirit if not sound,2 and she takes pride in the fact that more of her peers are rapping in their Australian accents since she started blowing up. She’s also breaking ground as a queer artist in rap, the self-described “trans adlay” who is clearing the path for more to follow.
The album itself is a sonic evolution for Phillips. Working exclusively in the studio with producer Rapallo (who also guests under his emcee alias Bootleg Baby), C**T peels back the distortion, leaving Phillips’ vocoded vocals to cut through the synth-heavy production that Phillips compares lovingly to Kanye West’s 808s & Heartbreak or early Drake.
“My previous auto-tune rap work has been me in my own studio getting sent beats, or finding beats and then recording myself on them,” she says.
“It was really dope being able to work in-studio with the producer right next to me, who I think is one of the most talented producers in the game, and do it all live. If I had any ideas or input, I could be like, ‘What if we did this?’ and just build the song as we’re making it.”
For fans used to hearing Phillips rap through heavier filters, it might be an adjustment. Part of the joy of Phillips’ older work is seeing how many layers she can stack between her voice and her listener, and then marvelling at how she still manages to cut through no matter what. C**T foregoes a lot of that friction in favour of a record that shows a more tender, mature Sidney Phillips.
“I go through old Notes documents or old Story posts and sometimes to see what was going on back then, and I think, ‘Damn, I see how I thought that way’, but I think my brain works so differently now,” she tells me. “My brain is more developed and I see how foolish I could be. I was more reckless back then and I’ve got to be more sensible now. I like to be more sensible.”
That growth is reflected across C**T. The suicidal ideation that permeated nearly every song she used to put out years back has receded as Phillips pens songs about love in all its forms — romantic, platonic, familial and communal.
But an undercurrent of loneliness lingers, most compellingly in the background of songs that otherwise skim happy: ‘In My Room’ is a slick R&B-adjacent song ostensibly about sneaking away to dance with a lover in the familiar trappings of your bedroom, but it spins out into paranoia and pain. ‘Escape Life’ has the inflection of a holiday song, but its call to “sleep all day, all night” makes the title feel somewhat literal. It is, as Phillips puts it, “sad robot music”.
“I’ve felt isolated in life before, being different and all of that, and that’s part of the eshay ethos as well, being different and saying ‘fuck you’ to everybody,” she says. “You’re different and sort of alien, but you’ve still got a heart. Emotionally, auto-tune music portrays that so well. It’s blending the mechanical and computer with heart and emotion.”
Phillips rattles off a list of touchstones that intuitively fit: Ninajirachi,3 Daft Punk, Wicca Phase Springs Eternal, $uicideboy$ and “Bladee, Bladee, Bladee,” she says, grinning again. “Like, come on.”4
Of course, Phillips is one of many artists building a house in a village that Bladee helped build. The intersection of cloudy, electronic rap that dabbles in sadness and substances is seminal to a generation of rappers across the world.
But Phillips is much more than just a Drain Gang acolyte. She’s a rich storyteller; just peep the vivid specificity of her parent-saluting anthem ‘Mums’ and feel the warmth interwoven into her nihilism across C**T.
The heart of the album comes on its best track ‘Levitate’. It might be one of the best songs anyone’s made this year. Rapallo’s production defrosts the 808s to make something that feels intimate and yearning, like brushing elbows with a could-be lover on the late-night walk home.
On its hook, the latest, fullest world view of Sidney Phillips comes into focus. One that leaves space for optimism, hope and a romance with being alive: “Enough about them, let ‘em do what they do/More about us, more about crew/More about God, more about love, more about love.”
But it’s not all about love. Album closer ‘Packed Up’ sees Phillips unfiltered in more ways than one. No vocoder and no punches pulled, Phillips cuts loose for nearly three minutes. There are too many highlights to pull from, but my personal favourite: “Who would’ve thought I’d go so fucking far?/Me, cunt, because I know I’ve worked so fucking hard.”
“Fuck yeah,” Phillips says when I bring up the energy of ‘Packed Up’. “I mean, it’s a rap album after all. You’ve got to talk your shit at some point.”
And if anyone’s earned the right to talk their shit, it’s Sidney Phillips. She’s only 23 and five years into her career and yet she has already influenced a wave of Australian rappers, most of whom can’t hold a candle to her ear for beats or her talent with the pen.
In a fair world, C**T is the record that will make Sidney Phillips undeniable to the wider Australian music world. In whatever world this is, it’ll form part of what will become an indelible legacy, one way or another.
‘C**T’ is out now via Tabloid Recordings. Buy or stream it here.
Obligatory TYSN
Her recent collab with lil ket ‘Raincoat’ suggests she’d make a ripping punk album, for what it’s worth.
Treat yourself and listen to BAYANG (tha Bushranger)’s ‘CCTV’, which features Sidney Phillips rapping over Ninajirachi production.
Cut for space, but Sidney also shouts out obscure posthumous Michael Jackson cut ‘Blue Gangsta’ which — hell yeah, Sidney.