Local pop singer Sycco delivers on years of promise with debut album

Personally, you’re paying me to go back to those sleepy houseshare lives. Dirty dishes piled in the sink for days on end, another stranger on the couch every time I wake up. And drinking, oh my god, drinking.

However, in her new album Zorb BallSycco (aka local bedroom pop artist Sasha McLeod) somehow makes it all sound fun and even comforting. “It’s about finding family or friends that you can lean on to get you through the hard times,” the 22-year-old said over Zoom. “I love it and I think I’ll be living in a sharehouse for a long time.”

Shared housing is a rite of passage for those in their 20s, and also Zorb BallThe album was inspired by a grand home, once the residence of former mayor Clem Jones, where MacLeod and her friends lived in Brisbane before moving to Melbourne. “It was just so huge. We had a pool and glass windows everywhere with a panoramic view of Brisbane. It was so cool,” she recalls.

The boredom of life in Brisbane fueled MacLeod and her roommates’ creativity. “We would play a lot Fortnite “I would make these crazy trap beats, and I’d turn on Autotune, and everyone would sing a verse. We just had fun with it,” she laughs. “At some point these songs started sounding kind of cool, and I was like, ‘Guys, can I use this stuff on my album? ‘”

Not that her roommates were all musicians. “No, they had never made music before. One of them was a scientist. Another was a painter,” McLeod said.

So what does a scientist’s song sound like? “It’s pretty moving, actually,” she points to the swinging synth-gospel track. I am here nowseeing it as the fruit of their labor. “They are very empathetic.”

This relaxed and collaborative spirit drives Zorb BallThis is McLeod’s highly anticipated debut solo album, following a string of critically acclaimed singles including 2020’s Dribbling and 2022 rippleBoth songs charted on Triple J’s Hottest 100 singles chart and were nominated for the National Aboriginal Music Award, establishing Sycco as one of Australia’s most promising pop stars. Dribblinga catchy synth-pop track that Sycco’s first EP It was released in 2021 and won the singer Song of the Year at the Queensland Music Awards that same year.

if Zorb Ball It was a long wait for the Aboriginal artist, and it was purposeful. “It took me a long time to figure out what I wanted to say because it was never going to be just a compilation of songs,” McLeod said. “Because even with my EP, I just called it Sycco’s first EP, “It’s not thoughtful. This has to be a little more thoughtful.”

The album’s title concept – “zorb” – came from a high. “I was just high on psychedelics,” McLeod says with a laugh. “Zorb is kind of like when you’re having a deep conversation with someone. Or it doesn’t even have to be deep, but you forget about the outside world and are just there with them. I imagined it as a spherical globe that would surround us and make us invisible to the outside world, and it represented these moments that I was having with myself, really just in my head and how I was feeling. I would make myself sick if I kept talking about it anyway,” she says with a laugh.

In addition to her roommate, collaborators on the album include fellow labelmates Flume, Mallrat and Banoffee, all of whom have been friends for many years and provided McLeod with a safe space to explore sensitive topics, including her resilient and painful sexuality on this album. Touch and talk. The album also showcases McLeod’s typically expansive sound, with songs that blend ultra-pop, UK garage, jazzy R&B, and psychedelic rock.

“I’ve always struggled with this, and not being able to make cohesive music is a bad thing,” McLeod says. “But when I’m in the studio, I never want to control what I’m doing too much, I just want to let it flow. It’s always more fun to set fewer restrictions.”

I have thought about is a notable outlier in the Sycco catalog, an acoustic song that strips back the production and leans into Midwestern emo. “That song, they had to convince me. I never thought I’d do an acoustic guitar song,” McLeod says. “I think you can hear on the album, my stuff is pretty messed up. But my grandma did tell me she wanted me to write a ballad, so that song was for my grandma.”

His grandmother has long been a major inspiration to MacLeod. Growing up in Cairns, the daughter of parents from Erub Island in the Torres Strait, Faye MacLeod was a jazz and cabaret singer who found success in music and radio in Ireland in the 1960s and 1970s as Candy Devine.

“I’ve never seen her perform live, but I’ve seen black-and-white videos of her online, and her voice is just crazy, just insane,” McLeod said. “She’s very supportive, but she also won’t lie to me. She’s outspoken, and I appreciate that.”

So what does Grandma think of McLeod’s musical chaos: Is she unabashedly feeding her some classic pop hits as a hint? “We talked about Nat King Cole once, for example, but that was it,” McLeod says with a laugh. “It’s a different world because I’m not a jazz singer and I definitely don’t do cabaret. But she loves to hear me talk about it all. She’s my boss.”

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McLeod’s father, a chef, first exposed her to music, teaching her to play a few chords on the family guitar when she was seven. But it wasn’t until ninth grade, when she saved up money for a year and bought herself a Mac, that music-making became something she pursued seriously. McLeod taught herself how to make music by watching YouTube videos. “I always wanted to be a producer, not an artist, and I realized I could do it. I didn’t have to wait for someone to do it for me, or anything.”

That same year, she formed a band with the sole goal of recording a song, and after researching the top producers in the Brisbane area, she found local legend Constantine Kerstin. “I pestered him for years to let me intern at his studio,” McLeod says, “and then, after I graduated high school, he let me intern.”

Years later, she’s released a supremely confident debut: sonically bold, thematically rich, full of youthful longing, and emotionally rich. “There were a lot of learning experiences—my first relationship, my first heartbreak. But this album is about how community helped me get through it all,” McLeod says.

Or in other words, a shared home for it all.

Sycco Zorb Ball It will be released on August 23rd.

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