There’s an anxiety that comes with listening to a self described coming-of-age record from an artist that you’ve been able to trust thus far to make you feel like you never have to grow up. I’ll be thirty next year, so maybe that fear of growing up is my downfall, but I’m leaning in for now.
I really do think it’s been the key to Sycco’s magic, that she’s managed to maintain a tight grasp on this playfulness, experimentation and lack of creative boundaries that mirror the reckless abandon and freedom of what we understand youth to be. Zorb - which Sycco self-defines as ‘the transparent spherical (metaphorical) globe that surrounds human beings when they share a deep connection,” takes all of the energy and glimmers of what we knew of her from the big hits to date like ‘Dribble’ and the Flume & Chrome Sparks-featuring ’Ripple’, and channels it into a deeper than expected love letter to the profound, yet silly, depth of building a world with the people you feel safe in - you and your share-house against the world. As someone who experienced share-house moments like a housemate moving out without telling anyone then banging down the door at midnight to collect some shoes, and accidentally falling in love with another, this is an extremely unrelatable concept to me, but it’s nice to live in the thought for a while. I suppose mess is inevitable - in share-housing and in early 20s life - but that mess can be beautiful and profound, as Sasha McLeod makes very clear on this album.
Sonically, it is about as unabashed as you would expect, actually. Elements of the mad world crafted by Remi Wolf and her ‘layer then layer again’ collaborator Solomonophonic surround ‘Swarm’, while there’s a previously untapped confidence on some of the newer compositions, the Republica-esque power-pop synth that brings out the post apocalyptic feel of ‘Bad World’ has a certainty and acceptance of the state of being unsure, as does the album’s spacey closer ‘Zeitgeist’. But that confidence is visible on the lighter production moments too - the album’s only acoustic song ‘Crossed My Mind’ is a moment away from the magical chaos to prove in a singular listen that they’re also a daggers-to-the-heart songwriter. Her songwriting zorb to build this variance includes a litany of local icons, expats and best-kept-secrets, including Mallrat, Banoffee and Sarah Aarons, all of whom when you think about it properly, are artists who in their own way have built their own form of a zorb, a safe place to be daring.
“Humans are so cute,” Sycco said to me in an interview one time. She was so real for that. But the humans that she talks about and is evidently inspired by on this record are also clearly emotionally intelligent, broad thinking, people who feel and embrace emotion and the power of living in the moment. This is a wonderful reminder of a record that a coming-of-age record doesn’t have to mean you’re all grown up, that it’s not linear at all and that growing up is sometimes less about the world at large, and more about your inner orbit and the way you make people feel.
This record is best experienced on a sunny morning, with a good coffee and a broad, optimistic mind… inside your zorb.
