Sidney Phillips has spent her whole career as a one-woman operation. She wrote it, rapped it, mixed it, mastered it, put it out herself — five albums’ worth, going back to a kid in the outer suburbs north of Brisbane uploading vaporwave edits to Bandcamp because there was nowhere else for that music to go. It’s part of why she’s never sounded like anyone else working in Australian rap: nobody else was making all the decisions. On C**T, out today via Tabloid Recordings — her sixth album, and her first with a team behind her — she gives some of that up on purpose, trading total control for a label that’s backed the vision rather than reshaped it. LISTEN HERE.

It’s her first record made alongside a team rather than entirely on her own, and the first time the mix and master have been shaped through collaboration rather than her hands alone. C**T is still Sidney’s vision — it’s just also the product of years of hard work, friendships, and the people who’ve shown up around her along the way. It’s the first Sidney Phillips album with a single credited producer across the whole tracklist: her longtime collaborator and fellow stealthyn00b member Rapallo, who also turns up on the mic himself, under his bootleg baby alias, for a feature on ‘Hahaha’. Losing some of that grip hasn’t made the record sound less like her, though — if anything, it’s the most legible version of her sound yet, filtered through someone who’s spent years inside it alongside her rather than a stranger smoothing off the edges. It’s a record made for the fans who’ve been there from the beginning, and it’s shaping up to be her most cohesive — and most “flashy” — to date. “It’s similar in heart and spirit to my earlier stuff,” Phillips says, “but the writing’s a bit different this time. I’d call it my most mature album.”

Mature doesn’t mean muted. Phillips still writes in the voice that’s made her a fixture of the Australian underground — melancholic gutter rap crossed with unfiltered self-portrait, delivered in an accent she’s never once tried to Americanise. She’s got her sights set beyond that underground now too: at 23, having never left Australia’s shores, Phillips is ready to take that voice — and Australian music with it — out into the world. Touring, growing, travelling, representing Australian rap overseas: it’s the next chapter she’s building toward, and C**T is the launchpad. Ask her to sum up her sound in her own words, though, and she reaches for something plainer than any of that: “My music is melodic, fun, colourful and above all else expressive.” It’s a description that sits oddly next to the subject matter until you’ve actually heard it — the brightness isn’t a disguise for the heaviness underneath; it’s how the heaviness gets through at all.

Her reference points have always been as terminally online as she is — Zyzz one minute, Effy Stonem the next, a Minecraft bar thrown in for good measure — and she’s somehow made all of it add up to something that plays just as well to Mallrat as it does to Ninajirachi. She’s since landed a triple j Unearthed Feature Artist slot and turned in a Bars Of Steel freestyle that’s still being passed around group chats, but she’s never once stopped being the same kid who wore the Stealthyn00b polo to school. Mixtapes still get fired off to the collective like clockwork.

What’s changed on C**T is the frame around that voice, not the voice itself. She and Rapallo built the record’s palette out of what they’ve taken to calling ‘sad robot music’ — the autotune-as-confession lineage of Wicca Phase Springs Eternal, Bladee, and Kanye’s 808s & Heartbreak, artists who found a way to make a vocoder sound like grief. That’s the register C**T lives in: hooks bright enough to be fun, underneath them a writer working through something heavier. The album’s lead single and closing track, ‘Packed Up’, is the one moment where that shifts — the only song on C**T where she’s rapping rather than singing. “It’s got a really cool and wavy beat by Rapallo,” Phillips says, “and it’s a special song since it is the only track on the album where I’m just rapping and not singing.”

Raised in Morayfield on Gubbi Gubbi Country, she now splits her time between Queensland and Naarm / Melbourne, Phillips has built her whole catalogue out of that same refusal to sound like she’s imitating someone else’s scene. She calls herself a ‘trans adlay’ less as a lyric than as a flag planted in the ground, and when she talks about what actually sets her apart, she’s precise about where the gap sits: “There’s been Aussie rap music and there’s been lad rappers and LGBT indie music, but not much combination between those genres. As an LGBT Aussie rapper, I’m able to combine those two sounds without sounding too unnatural.” That’s still true on C**T — it’s just being handed to more people than usual to help make it.