It kind of feels like one of those Nettspend shows people talk about. The spread of people in the crowd packed inside the Lansdowne is whiplash-inducing: a decent amount of hypebeast looking influencers, some slightly too aggressive boys opening moshpits to songs that are basically just slow ballads, teenagers somehow smoking joints next to security guards who usually borderline assault people just for flashing a vape. But crammed towards the front, carrying the energy of the room, are the true fans. Screaming, howling along to lyrics, arms punching the air, extending, reaching out to try and touch; a devotional, borderline spiritual experience. Something is happening here.
Seeing that show leaves no doubt that Sidney Phillips’ I’m So Tired of Feeling Staunchly is nothing short of a first-ballot, ‘Australian’ hip-hop classic. It holds that feeling of listening to something you know will be a future touchstone, something of immense cultural significance.
F**k the world, F**k the world, F**k the world c**nt
F**k the world, I don’t evеr have no fun
F**k these c**nts brah, F**k thеse c**nts
F**k every c**nt make em’ get on their knees c**nt
You can kiss my Ntays
– Sidney Phillips, ‘Without U’
How can you even explain such beautifulness? Like most pluggnb and cloud rap – decidedly zoomer brands of hip-hop – Staunchly is totally immediate in its sugar-coated, race-you-to-the- finish sound and brutally unfiltered lyrical content. Sidney Phillips is nothing but unashamedly real, and it’s speaking to a generation of kids in a way ‘Australian’ hip-hop hasn’t for a long time.
“My favorite artists, they're really good at expression and they're a character. I wanna know about who I'm listening to. Like I want to know all the lore, let me into your life sort of thing. So I was like, I'm just gonna write about what I like, I'm gonna write about stuff that makes me smile, and I'm just gonna put it all over these beats and it'll be cool.”
Sidney Phillips grew up in Moreton Bay, just north of Brisbane, where the “further out you go the more a bit hectic it gets.” Her fourth album, released in 2023, Staunchly is an honest description of real life as a teenager in droning, endless Australian suburbia, speaking about actual issues that young people in this country deal with (mental health, gender, drugs, fare evading). Simultaneously, with its twinkly and bass-boosted beats the record offers a sense of escapism, the potential of an ‘Adlay Summer’; you’re going through shit yes, but you and your homies can still find time to ‘Punch this billy like it owes me some oneymay.’
The secret ingredient is Sidney’s ridiculous ear for melody: layered vocal harmonies, auto-tuned voice pushed to its most passionate limits. Staunchly is even more clever lyrically, where pop-culture references that should be outrageous in their unabashedness, like “Flippin' product, I feel like Jesse / C**t I'm Cassie, c*nt I'm Effy,” actually hit hard due to how much emotion is packed into them. And some are just straight up funny, like “My life like South Park / Everyday I’m Towelie.”
[When asked why she feels like Towelie] “Because that c**t is off his head bro [laughs]."
But arguably most important to Staunchly’s pedigree is its proud recognition of adlay/eshay/lad culture. It’s a cultural etymology BAYANG knows well.
“It comes back to inner-city Sydney. Redfern. Woolloomooloo. Sydney Searcher. Maybe not super-organised gang crime, but neighbourhood cliquing up. And this sort of uniform that emerges. As people are trying to do jobs on bigger targets, like jewellery stores and that kind of stuff. And so suddenly they go in. They're like, ‘I can't be wearing my f**king Everlast. I can't be wearing my f**king Kmart gear. I've got to come in in this full Nautica, I've got to come in in this full Polo. I've got to look like a customer.’ So they come in. They're not arousing any suspicion. And they pump the f**king job… F**king next minute it's everywhere. You go out to a rural town. You see kids dressing like how people did in inner-city Sydney in the 90s.”
Born from inner-city inequality, from messy, sometimes violent material conditions, of course adlay culture was looked down upon by an Australian society where classism and ‘properness’ is fiercely hegemonic. But it's gentrification into JD Sports ads and inner-west Sydney art-school fits should be proof enough of its authority as a distinct countercultural movement – not in the way a postmodern art movement may crown itself with manifestos and canons, but as a truly genuine ‘Australian’ cultural product..
“It has morphed into this chimerical, mongrel thing. That is ours. And ours alone… And it speaks to something. It speaks to this feeling of being an outsider. Of the rest of your immediate society looking down their nose on you. And there comes a point where you go f**k it. I'm not going to be ashamed about it anymore. I'm actually going to double down. And like f**k you. If you don't like it, f**k off.”
Similarly overlooked, and held dear by BAYANG, is ‘lad rap’ or ‘gutter rap’ – an underground movement often ridiculed at the time of ascendant ‘barbeque rap’. Channels like Hustle Hard TV offered a platform for this non-label affiliated hip-hop.
“So much of it was just bound to be viral. Because these personalities just capture you. Skeez Loren – bro has the Polo Ralph Loren tattooed on his face. Hectic c**nt!”
Unlike the imported sounds of ‘barbeque’ hip-hop, ‘gutter rap’ maps more onto the same lines of how hip-hop grew organically in the U.S. – a reflection of street culture and everyday reality, where the music was at times almost a byproduct. It’s influence is undeniable though – everyone from T-Breezy to ONEFOUR shouting out ‘earching’ in their music. It’s big for Sidney Phillips, too. So much of her music is constructed from assumed language, from pig latin and eshay affiliated slang – it’s borderline historian work.
“I've always heard people say it’s pig latin for sesh, but that would be ‘esh say’ right? My theory about the origin of eshay, cause it's a word that sort of doesn't really mean anything, it's just like ‘eshay’ you know. It's just being like ‘yeah’ – I think it maybe comes from [the word ‘yes] ‘es-yay’ But that's hard to say. So it's ‘eshay.”
By being such a language first medium, hip-hop often acts as a chronicle of the vernacular of the everyday. It can give a satisfying feeling of recognition, of a shared knowledge and experience – good luck explaining what a ‘Jisoe Cone’ actually is; it’s something you just understand, feel almost in its ridiculous specificity. The performance of that language matters to Sidney too.
“When I first started out singing, I was doing an American accent because that's what I was used to hearing. And then I was like ‘this kind of sounds whack and doesn’t sound like me.’ If you can't stand on the sound of your own voice, then what can you stand on?”
Sidney’s pre-Staunchly records were more boom bap in sound, but once she cracked auto-tune, there was no looking back. Inspired by foundational gender-diverse artists like quinn and d0llywood1, she found the aesthetics of digicore and pluggnb provided interesting grounds to explore her gender identity.
“Sometimes pitching it (the track) up is like a gender-affirming sort of thing. It makes it sound cuter. It makes it sound softer. And so it feels nice.”
I’m So Tired of Being Staunchly (staunch in this context referring more to ‘arking up’ rather than being loyal) is Sidney’s attempt at capturing her complexity; both ‘Washing blood off my Nikes,’ but also making sure her ‘Hair clips match the Air Max on my feet.’
“I feel like it's just really rough, because with gender sometimes it feels like you either have to be one or the other right? Or like go all the way over. Like if I'm gonna be a girl, I have to be girl girl.
“Some c**nts want to be the gender police. Maybe it's just me in my head to myself, for thinking like, ‘Oh if you're a trans girl, then you should do this, and trans people look like this.’ But you should be who you want. And everybody's different. I think it was important for me to try and get that idea out there too – that people like me exist.”
Featured releases: Penance (2024), AVANT ADALY (2023), I'm So Tired of Being Staunchly (2023)
It often feels like the ‘Australian’ music industry is eons away from throwing support behind music as honest and forward-thinking as Sidney Phillips. In a country with such geographic sparseness and lack of support for young creative people, the internet has been particularly important for Sidney and her crew stealthyn00b.
“The real life scene, it just wouldn't exist without the online scene… If it weren't for the internet I don't think we would ever have left Brisbane.”
The crew, whose name came from an Xbox gamertag generator, “stealthynoob two-four-eight-seven, some shit like that,” first met on a private Discord server, and started releasing music on an open-to-all Soundcloud page. The lineup changed and condensed over the years, to a more focused, core group: Sidney’s main partner in crime lil ket (“probably one of the greatest Australian artists of all time”), Skratcha (“e's really steezy”) luvlxckdown (a one-time collaborator with d0llywood1 and silly gang), twinlite, jx333 and ggabriel.
stealthyn00b now has its own Discord community for fans, and a strong presence across Soundcloud and sites like Rate Your Music. They’re but one of many groups of young musicians making forward-thinking, ‘online’ music, building connections and communities all across the country. Other standout ‘Australian’ cloud-rap projects shine as a beautiful mosaic of internet influences. Trying to Do Better, another inner circle ‘Australian’ rap record, sounds like if keep it goin xav was a major budget Broadway musical. A collaboration between Sydney rapper Scan00 & Perth producer Sus1er, it balances hyper-local references like “Talking shit on live I'm not Kyle nor Jackie-O / Green and red beams we don't go for the Rabbitohs” with expert knowledge of Soundcloud influences covering everything from Drain Gang to jersey club.
It’s a scene with a resilient spirit – young people creating despite geographic sparseness and weak industry support. And not just limited to the internet scene; other examples include Sydney record label and party crew Beat Kitchen Records, broad Melbourne group Picked Last & cross border collective CONTENT.NET.AU. It’s that word that everyone wants to say nowadays, ‘community’ – oft repeated in arts industries, to the point of unintentional parody in the audacious range of its application. But for artists like BAYANG, music and community are one and the same – the point of the whole thing itself.
“You find your allies. And you build these bridges based on, ‘oh, you feel the same thing I feel. You hear the same thing I hear.’ That's when a real connection is built.”
These collectives are examples of a worldwide reaffirming of DIY music and independent spaces; artists being ever more squeezed by a terminal capitalist world but saying screw it, let’s just do it ourselves. It’s a dialectic that Teether knows well by now.
“I am busy, and everyone I know is insanely busy… Like, working full time, six, seven days a week even, still playing shows, making videos, making shit. Everyone's doing each other favors. No one's getting paid to be on anyone's shit, because no one's got money. And that's why I think the quality of music, being as good as it is at home, is such a flex. Like, it's so good. And no one has to do it, it's all optional. But it bangs.”
What’s unique about this ‘Australian’ underground hip-hop scene is the romanticisation of building a potential escape from our essentially depressing modern life, a self-aware solidarity built into the music itself. Take BAYANG’s refrain on ‘GIMME UR LOVE’, ‘Black mould in my lungs / The ecosystem thriving,’ a track from a Sydney supergroup literally called ‘GUILD’ which has become a thesis statement and a rallying call for the scene itself.
GUILD is BAYANG, Sevy, producer Grasps and Uncle Kal – the latter being one half of Slim Set, a Sydney duo from the late 2010s that was totally embryonic for this generation of ‘Australian’ underground rap. Producer Atro’s club/rap hybrid beats, and Kal’s unabashed embrace of hyper-local references (dri-fits, El Jannah, Zyzz) were particularly influential for BAYANG himself.
“Super inspiring… I was like, damn, look at these f**king dorks. Like, look at these c**nts, just doing it. Like, with their whole chest. So important.”
With Slim Set on unofficial hiatus since 2021, GUILD feels not only like a full-circle, cross-era moment, but a revival of sorts. Kal’s verses carry the feeling of a legendary figure wanding back in from the mist: ‘Haven’t touched grass since back in the day / Thinking about what I wanna say / Used to come easier, your boy’d spray / Am I gonna keep barring when I turn 28? / F**k it, uncle’s back / Pour out the Berocca and the blue Gatorade.” You can almost hear the weight lifting off his shoulders, and it's indicative of the new perspective he’s found.
“When you're in your early 20s you have so much pressure to make a name for yourself, to do this, to tick off these goals, to play this show, to earn this much… And now I feel quite free from a lot of that in a way and I feel like we can go back to our original mission, which was actually just trying to chase the sound that we have in our heads… But it's still just like not quite there yet in Ableton, you know?”
This sentiment feels especially central to Teether’s music. Each verse and record feels like a further step towards an unclear, but deeply desired goal.
“I feel like it's always happening… I've been working on a record… I've been walking around listening to it, and I'm kind of like, this is the sound. I'm like, ‘finally, I figured it out.’ Every album kind of feels that way.”
It’s a more radical perspective on making music and art, shared also by BAYANG – releasing yourself from commercial expectations, measuring yourself against your own parameters, and that of your peers.
“A lot of people describe underground, as an artist who has yet to pop, But I've been thinking more of underground as a deliberate ethos, like it's a skill tree."
“In one of the lower moments of this year [2024] it really made me reevaluate everything from the ground up. And I came to the conclusion that, regardless of the success of this music, I think I just want to be able to make music well into my old age. And everything else is kind of just a bonus… And, yeah, if I ever make some money off of it, that'd be cool. I'd like it. I'm not gonna sit here and pretend that I wouldn't like it. Part of playing the blues is knowing what's in your cards. And if that's not in my cards, that's not in my cards. You know?”
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“Heavy humidity / Reality bends in the heat of my city… 10 degrees heat in the Western Sydney.” The lyrics of ‘BABYLON’ feels particularly prescient at BAYANG’s south-west Sydney apartment. It’s approaching 5pm but it's still oppressively hot, the sun awkwardly refusing to move along.
REDBRICKGOTHIK places the western suburbs of Sydney as a cast-away region, not just metaphorically but physically too. The flood-plain geography traps heat in its bowl, without the coast’s sea-breeze as relief. For BAYANG it’s almost metaphysical though, a real life “melting-pot” of opportunity. It’s a mindset he’s coined ‘area futurism’ – a “non-nationalistic, non-settler colonial sense of community.” A very “small seed” of something potentially bigger.
“That's what I've always loved about the area. There's this joie de vivre, there's this lust for life mate… Area culture is like, you can't replicate that anywhere. I've been to a few places in the world, and they have areas, but they don't have the area. No one has this… That's why it's hot here, man. It's an engine. Something's cooking here.”
Words by Lindsay Riley. Graphics by Rafael Enriquez