Syd Bennett Finds Fulfillment Beyond Accolades with New Album 'Beard'

There was a time when Sydney Bennett really wanted “something to show for all of my hard work”. The 34-year-old singer-rapper-producer-engineer was a member of Odd Future, the anarchic Los Angeles rap collective that also included Tyler, the Creator, Frank Ocean and Earl Sweatshirt. In 2011, that group birthed the Internet, the indie-R&B band Bennett formed with her best friend, Matt Martians. Since then, Bennett has released two acclaimed solo records, collaborated with Beyoncé and Kehlani, and been nominated for a Grammy, alongside the Internet.

Still, around the time of her last album, 2022’s Broken Hearts Club, she started hoping for an award or public recognition. But then she bought a house – a nice spot on the same street she grew up on in Mid-City, LA – “and now I’m happy”. I look at her quizzically, sitting across from me in a private room in a hotel in east London, as she takes a sip of pineapple juice. It was as simple as that, I ask? She lets out a guffaw, flashing a set of perfect teeth. “I’m afraid it was,” she says, grinning conspiratorially.

Bennett cuts a low profile. She is small, with a shaved head, and prefers neutral tones; today, she is clad in grey shoes, huge grey jeans and a grey sweatshirt with frayed edges. On her new album, Beard, her voice is quietly commanding – a cheeky R&B purr that’s rough on one side, smooth as glass on the other. But in person she laughs loudly, cracks wacky jokes and comes across like a true music nerd, excited to show me photos of the studio she’s built in her parents’ house. We’re here to talk about Beard, named in celebration of the peach fuzz on her top lip, but sometimes it seems as if she’s more thrilled to talk about the amazing stuff her bandmates are preparing to put out.

Part of the reason Bennett no longer feels like she needs the accolades is that she’s now making music that truly feels like her. She describes Beard as her “first really me album”. Her solo debut, Fin, released in 2017, was motivated by her desire to prove her songwriting chops and make a career writing for other people. She figured that releasing one of the year’s best R&B albums would be a good way to show off her work. (She doesn’t phrase it quite as self-confidently as that.) Fin’s follow-up, Broken Hearts Club, was a breakup album, filled with songs she had to get out, almost as a form of therapy. Beard, then, “feels like the first album where I get to really focus on myself, lean into myself” – evidenced by songs such as 2 Many Days, on which she celebrates her success in music, and the fact that much of the production on the album was handled by Bennett herself.

She was born and raised in LA. Her mother worked as a clerk, her father worked as president of sales for Small World Toys, and she and her brother Travis (an Odd Future member better known as Taco) sometimes modelled for the toy company. When she was a teenager, Bennett started to take an interest in music production, and turned her parents’ guesthouse into a makeshift studio. She would post about the studio on MySpace and invite people over. When she and Taco became part of Odd Future in 2007, the crew would record in the Bennett family studio, defacing the walls and smashing the windows.

For the most part, Bennett was seen as the DJ and engineer of Odd Future. The group celebrate their 20th anniversary next year, and she’s still friends with many of the crew. She spoke to Tyler, the Creator yesterday; he was wondering why she and Steve Lacy, another Internet member, were releasing their albums on the same day (Bennett thinks it’s cute, and they’ll probably have a joint party; Tyler thinks the albums need their own moments), but she seems uneasy when she considers her time in the group.

Once Odd Future became a real thing – with record deals and tours and a fanbase – Bennett started struggling. The days just hanging out in the house “were good, because I felt like we were friends. Ultimately, the truth was just that we were all working toward the same goal. Once we got on the road, that became more evident, and I was like: OK, we’re not friends.” Once, she remembers, she called a band meeting – “We probably had three meetings as a group ever, and I called two of them” – to talk about where they would record. “I remember saying: ‘You guys can still record here,’ and one of them said, ‘We’re not even friends like that,’” she says.

She became increasingly depressed, “which no one else in the group could understand”. Thankfully, Matt Martians, her bandmate from the Internet, was somebody who would grab me and be like: ‘Come on, you’re OK, you’re OK’ … Nobody in Odd Future would do that, and I don’t blame any of them for that. But that’s what made it really hard for me once we started touring,” she says. “I was unmedicated, dealing with a depressive disorder on the road around people who ignored it, probably out of their own discomfort. We were teenagers, but even to this day, a lot of the guys in Odd Future are pretty non-confrontational.”

She says that she doesn’t take her time in Odd Future for granted though, not least because it set her and her brother up for success, and made their parents proud. Plus, the Internet came out of Odd Future. “And, you know, Tyler still spends every Christmas and Thanksgiving at my house,” she says. “Ultimately, it’s a beautiful thing.”

When Bennett started making music, she wanted to be a producer, but lacked the confidence. When she was a teenager and first taking interest in production, she explains, she “was intimidated by all the men I was around” – Bennett was the only woman in Odd Future – “and they didn’t show interest in any of my production, so I just assumed I wasn’t there yet”. Later, she realised that it wasn’t that the guys didn’t want to hear her production, they were all focused on their own work.

After those Odd Future days – the group have been largely inactive for more than a decade, with individual members such as Tyler, the Creator and Frank Ocean becoming superstars in their own right – Bennett mostly put production to the side. But eventually, after Broken Hearts Club, she started making music for fun. “One day, I looked up and I had a lot of beats, and then the next day I looked up and I didn’t like anybody else’s beats,” she says. Martians “was the first person that ever told me: ‘Yo, that’s tight, you made that.’ I was like, really? No one’s ever said that to me.” She produced the majority of Beard herself – the first showcase of her talent – and for that reason she feels it’s a kind of coming-of-age record. Her production tends to be rhythmic and warm – traditionalist R&B delivered with a touch of sleek modernism. “I produced three songs on the first album, five songs on my second album, and on this one there’s 10.”

She worked on some of the album at the North Hollywood studio of R&B great Raphael Saadiq, a producer and writer who’s worked on many of the most important pop and R&B records of all time, including D’Angelo’s Voodoo and Beyoncé’s Renaissance. Bennett describes him as “the idol you want to meet … You can talk to him about anything; he tells a lot of stories. Most of the time I was over there, we weren’t working, we were just hanging out, talking, watching TV,” she says. “I feel like I can call him a mentor.”

Alongside Beard, Bennett has been working on the feverishly anticipated fifth Internet record, their first since 2018’s Hive Mind. Martians lives in rural Georgia, and Bennett recently went to record at his lake house; he’s in the driver’s seat for this project, in part because Bennett was busy writing songs for Beard. “It sounds nothing like my album, which is also intentional,” she says. “Something I’ve been thinking about is how to really separate me from the group sonically, because I hate when people conflate us.”

At this point, Bennett is totally content – creatively, spiritually, personally. “I’m really proud of myself, and I feel really accomplished. I’m at a point now, I think, where I’m not really chasing anything. I feel really blessed,” she says. It feels as if she’s being neither boastful nor bashful – just factual. The only reward she seems to care about is the ability to do things her own way.

“I bought my house, and my royalties cover my mortgage and more,” she says. “I’m like, great! This is the first time I’ve released an album and not wanted for anything. I have everything I want.” Beard’s inevitable success? That’ll just be gravy.

Syd’s album Beard is out now via Free Lunch/Warners. She plays Manchester, 31 August, and London, 1 September.