EX.814 Syd

The frontwoman of Grammy-nominated The Internet talks ambition, contentment and her third solo album, Beard.

Syd, born Sydney Bennett, is nearly 20 years into a career that started when she was a teenager. She cut her teeth as the in-house engineer and DJ for hip-hop collective Odd Future before forming The Internet, the Grammy-nominated soul group that helped shape a strand of Los Angeles R&B in the 2010s. Two solo albums followed—Fin in 2017 and Broken Hearts Club in 2022—but she describes her third, Beard, as the first that feels fully her own. She made it in the same period she married her partner and, by her own account, arrived at a version of self-acceptance she'd been circling for a decade.

In this Exchange, Syd sits down with RA's Content Production Lead Antonia Odunlami to talk about the album's title, a reference to the facial hair she stopped removing after years of treating it as something to hide. They also discuss letting go of who she was "supposed" to be, why she's stopped chasing the "sleep when you're dead" ambition she was raised on, and her plans to get back behind the CDJs after years away. Listen to the full episode.

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