Local pop star Sycco delivers on years of promise with her debut album

Personally, you couldn’t pay me to return to those woozy days of share house living. Dirty plates piled high in the sink for days on end, another random stranger sprawled on the sofa every time you wake up. And the drinking, oh god, the drinking.

And yet on her new album Zorb, Sycco , aka local bedroom-pop musician Sasha McLeod, somehow makes it sound fun and even comforting. “It’s about finding chosen family or those friends you can rely on to hold you through difficult times,” the 22-year-old says over Zoom. “I love it, I think I’m gonna be in a share house for a very long time.”

The share house, that 20-something rite of passage, is the key framing device on Zorb, the album’s origins lying in the opulent home, once the residence of former Lord Mayor Clem Jones, that McLeod and her friends lived in back in Brisbane, before they decamped to Melbourne. “It was f—ing massive. We had a pool and glass windows everywhere, and panoramic views of Brisbane. It was so sick,” she recalls.

Fuelled by that particular brand of Brisbane boredom, McLeod and her housemates would get creative. “We would play heaps of Fortnite and I would make these insane trap beats and then I would just put the autotune on and everyone would do a verse. That was how we had fun out there,” she laughs. “Somewhere along the line, the songs started sounding a bit cool and I was like, ‘Guys, can I use this stuff on my album?’ ”

Not that her housemates are musicians. “No, they’d never done music before. One of them’s a scientist. Another is a painter,” McLeod says.

So what does a song by a scientist sound like? “It’s very emotional, actually.” She points to the wobbly synth-gospel track, I’m Here Now, as the fruits of their labour. “They have lots of empathy.”

This looseness and collaborative spirit drives Zorb, McLeod’s long-awaited debut following a string of acclaimed singles including 2020’s Dribble and 2022’s Ripple, both of which landed on Triple J’s Hottest 100, earned nominations at the National Indigenous Music Awards, and made Sycco one of Australia’s most promising pop stars. Dribble, a star-making burst of hooky synth-pop, featured on Sycco’s First EP released in 2021, and won the singer a song of the year prize at the Queensland Music Awards that same year.

If Zorb has been a long time coming for the First Nations artist, it’s by design. “It took a long time to figure out what I was trying to say, because it wasn’t ever gonna just be a compilation of songs,” says McLeod. “Because even with my EP, I just called it Sycco’s First EP, it had no thought. This had to be a bit more thoughtful.”

The album’s titular concept – the “zorb” – came from an elevated state. “I was just tripping on acid,” McLeod laughs. “Zorb is kind of like when you have a deep conversation with someone. Or it doesn’t even have to be deep, but you forget the outside world and you’re just in it with them. I envisioned it as, like, a spherical globe that would surround us and would make us invisible to the outside world, and it kind of represented these moments with myself, just really in my head and in my feelings. Anyway, if I keep talking about it, I’m gonna make myself sick,” she laughs.

Beyond her housemates, the album features collaborators including labelmate Flume, and Mallrat and Banoffee, all longtime friends who provided a safe space for McLeod to tackle vulnerable topics, including her sexuality on the bouncy, aching Touching and Talking. The album also showcases McLeod’s typically expansive sonic palette, with songs ricocheting through hyperpop, UK Garage, jazzy R&B and stoner-y psychedelia.

“I’ve always kind of struggled with that, that it was a bad thing that I couldn’t really make cohesive music,” McLeod says. “But when I’m in the studio, I never want to control what I’m making too much, I just want to let it happen. It’s always more fun to set less limitations.”

Crossed My Mind is a marked outlier in the Sycco repertoire, an acoustic thing that strips back the production and tilts towards Midwest emo. “That one, they had to convince me. I never thought I would do an acoustic guitar song,” McLeod says. “I feel like you can hear in the album, my thing’s chaos. But my Granny did tell me she wanted me to write a ballad, so that one’s for Granny.”

Granny has long been a key inspiration to McLeod. Raised in Cairns to parents from Erub, an island in the Torres Strait, Granny is Faye McLeod, a former jazz and cabaret singer who had a successful music and broadcasting career in Ireland through the ’60s and ’70s under the name Candy Devine.

“I never saw her perform live but I’ve seen videos of her on the internet in black and white and she’s got an insane voice, it’s crazy,” says McLeod. “She’s so supportive of me, but also she won’t lie to me. She tells it straight, which I appreciate.”

So what does Granny think about McLeod’s musical chaos: is she not-so-subtly feeding her, like, crooner classics as a hint? “Like, we’ve had one conversation about Nat King Cole but that’s it,” McLeod laughs. “It’s different worlds because I’m not a jazz singer and I definitely don’t do cabaret. But she loves hearing about it all. She’s such a boss to me.”

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It was her chef father who first got McLeod into music, teaching her a few chords on the family guitar when she was seven. But it wasn’t until ninth grade, when she saved up her money for a year and bought herself a Mac, that music-making became a serious pursuit. Watching YouTube videos, McLeod taught herself how to produce. “I always wanted to be a producer more than an artist, and I just realised I could do it. I didn’t have to wait for someone else to help me out, or whatever.”

That same year she formed a band with the sole goal of recording a song, and after researching top producers in the Brisbane area landed on local legend Konstantin Kersting. “I hounded him for years to let me be an intern at his studio,” McLeod says, “and then he let me do it when I finished high school.”

Years on, she’s released a supremely confident debut: sonically adventurous, thematically rich and emotionally vibrant in its youthful yearning. “It’s been a lot of learning experiences that fed into this – my first relationship, first heartbreak. But it’s about how community held me through all that,” says McLeod.

Or to put it another way, the share house of it all.

Sycco’s Zorb is out on August 23.

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