It’s been a great week for fans of The Internet. Last Friday, three of the band’s four members – Syd, Steve Lacy and Chris Crispy – all dropped solo albums on the same day, while simultaneously confirming their collective comeback. It’s been eight years since The Internet’s last release, and they’ve spent five of them perfecting their next album, which is penned for next year. Syd, the band’s co-founder and frontwoman, lights up when I ask her about it. 

“We’re excited to drop this next album,” she says on a video call from her LA garage. “We’re in a good place with it. We’ve got a lot of it done. It’s foundationally there and built. Matt Martians [the band’s fourth member] has taken the lead on writing this Internet album. Since the three of us have all been finishing solo projects, Matt has been masterminding the album and bringing things to me to record. Honestly, this album is going to be one for the books.”

In the eight years since releasing their Grammy-nominated fourth studio album, Hive Mind, each member has pursued their own independent projects. For Syd, last Friday’s release marked her third solo album, as well as the first album she’s released in her 30s. Now 34, her life took a significant upward swing when she hit the big 3-0. 

“The biggest difference is that I spent my 20s really suffering from depression,” she says candidly. “I started therapy in my late 20s, which helped me to seek out psychiatry and that really helped me. Now I feel like I’m on even footing with everybody else. One thing that made me really content was buying a house. Having a backyard, having a garage – I realised that being a homeowner was one of my biggest dreams.”

The house sits just ten minutes away from her Californian childhood home, where she was raised as Sydney Bennett, with her brother Travis “Taco” (a fellow Odd Future graduate). Her mother worked as a city clerk but always dreamed of being a DJ, while her father worked in sales at a toy manufacturer. 

With her paternal side hailing from Jamaica, Syd was brought up on a musical diet of reggae and soul, played on repeat via her mother’s extensive playlists. She started making her own music at 14, before joining Tyler, the Creator’s alt hip-hop collective Odd Future at its inception the following year. Four years later, in 2011, she co-founded The Internet alongside producer Matt Martians. 

Though she spent her teenage years laying foundations within the music industry, she was still a teenager, grappling with personal insecurities around body image. “I was very, very self-conscious about my appearance,” she says. “I was a hairy kid.” Syd suffers from PMOS (Polyendocrine Metabolic Ovarian Syndrome), a hormonal imbalance that affects one in eight women globally. “One of the symptoms is hair growth – where most men would grow hair, we get either hair or acne. My mum never told me to shave. I wanted to, because I went to school and was hairier than all the other girls, so I went home and asked how I could fix that.”

Now, after decades of shaving, she’s decided to embrace her body hair. In particular, the short, spiky hairs sprouting from her upper lip. It's this newfound relationship with her facial hair that promoted the title for her new album, Beard, which originally had the working title Peach Fuzz – “because lately I’ve been letting my peach fuzz grow!” she giggles. “I identify as a woman so it’s kind of weird, because as women we’re told that we have to shave that. But I feel very much a woman and I also very much like my moustache.” 

“Honestly, this Internet album is going to be one for the books”

The last song on the album, “2 Many Days”, reflects on her teenage dreams and how they compare to her current goals. She admits that when she was younger, her ambitions revolved around capitalism. She wanted two things: money and to make a name for herself. Today, she feels very differently. “If we’re lucky, we realise before it’s too late that that stuff isn’t as important as being loved,” she says. “As someone who has lived with suicidal ideation, being loved and knowing that you’re loved is of ultimate importance.” 

Syd made the ultimate declaration of love last year when she married her longtime girlfriend, model Simone Clay. The ceremony was a simple one: “We did it at a window in the courthouse – it was like a drive-through,” she says. The whole thing happened very quickly. “I didn’t propose. We were up late watching the news, and we were like ‘This shit sucks… Should we leave? Should we go somewhere?’ But where would we go and would we be able to get married there? We started looking at gay marriage laws all over the world.” 

They decided there and then to apply for a marriage licence. When it was approved, they were assigned a wedding date, which happened to be just a few days later. “We got married, then I went straight from the courthouse to rehearsals for the Billie Eilish tour.” (Syd was the support act for Eilish’s Hit Me Hard and Soft tour last year). 

Given the current direction of global politics and the concerning growth of the far-right movement, it’s no surprise that Syd and her wife felt an urgency to tie the knot while they still legally can. “That was one reason why we went ahead and got married,” she says. “With the president we currently have in office, we didn’t know if we’d be able to do it forever. We wanted rights to each other.” 

She’s also in the process of applying for Jamaican citizenship, but she’s not about to leave her LA dream house anytime soon. “I will be the last one to go – I just bought this house!” she laughs. “This is my little patch of happiness. Get the fuck out of here. I’ve seen a lot of places, and I do believe that America is worth fighting for. I’m not leaving. You can go. You don’t like this country, you can leave!”

Despite the looming political threat to LGBTQ+ rights, we’ve still seen a positive increase in the number of queer women artists making it mainstream in recent years. Syd toured with two of them last year (Billie Eilish and Renée Rapp), and has spent the best part of 20 years trying to normalise queerness in the music industry by singing openly about her relationships with other women. “At first I was tiptoeing between trying not to pigeonhole myself as just a queer artist, and also trying to normalise same-sex lyrics,” she says. 

“I never wanted to make it an ‘I kissed a girl, and I liked it!’ kind of vibe. Some of us just live like this, and it’s not a trope. I’m happy to see it become more normalised, where the queer music that exists now is not just ‘I kissed a girl, and I liked it’ – it’s just gay girls and gay boys singing love songs.” 

Early on in her career, her lesbian peers felt pressured to sing about boys, swapping pronouns to he/him so the music was more digestible for a wider audience. But Syd has always been true to herself. “I knew gay women artists who, in their songs, were directing their love toward ‘him’ or ‘he’” she recalls. “I knew I could never bring myself to do that.”

“I knew gay women artists who, in their songs, were directing their love toward ‘him’ or ‘he’... I knew I could never bring myself to do that”

Last week, Syd and her wife celebrated their first wedding anniversary, but congratulations are in order on multiple counts. Not only is she happily wifed-off with a new album out and an Internet record on the way, she also won her first Grammy in the hiatus since her last release. Surprisingly, the accolade didn’t come via The Internet or any of her solo releases, but through “PLASTIC OFF THE SOFA”, a song she wrote for Beyoncé’s Renaissance. 

After working on Beyoncé’s The Lion King: The Gift album, for which she co-wrote ‘OTHERSIDE’, Syd got a call inviting her to join a writing camp for Renaissance. Everything was put on pause when the pandemic hit, but as life began to get back to normal, Syd reached out again, only to find that Beyoncé was still at square one. “I asked if I could send some more ideas and I had that song – some chords and a little drum loop and the chorus, that was it,” she says. “I sent it to Beyoncé’s team and was pleasantly surprised when they invited me to the studio to hear her recording of it.”

“[Beyoncé] showed me so much love. It was a confidence booster for sure. It gave me the courage to produce this album [Beard] for myself. ‘PLASTIC OFF THE SOFA’ was one of the first times I really got to produce for another artist. So that gave me the confidence I needed to trust my own ideas and produce my album. Beard is the first album of mine that I’ve produced all of. I don’t know if I would have had the courage to do that if it weren’t for Renaissance.” 

As for where her next Grammy will come from, maybe it will be Beard, maybe it will be the new Internet album, or maybe she’ll have writing credits on Beyoncé’s Act III. For now, she’s excited to return to London later this summer, where she’s performing at All Points East (curated by Tyler, the Creator) as well as headlining her own show. Formerly known as Syd tha Kyd, it’s safe to say that this artist is all grown up. Her “peach fuzz” is the proof.