You could read it as an ironic reference to her newly blossoming career, but the fin most obviously referenced by the title of Sydney Bennett’s debut album is the fish kind. Bennett obscures the swirling script of the album’s artwork with a jagged-edged mohawk, both text and hair submerged in a colour wash that fades from aquamarine to a deep-sea navy blue.
It looks like classically slinky and slightly saccharine R&B disrupted by androgyny, which isn’t a million miles away from how Fin sounds. Bennett – 24 years old, formerly of hip-hop collective Odd Future and latterly their offshoot the Internet – takes the late 90s/early 00s iteration of the genre and furnishes it with a narrative volte-face in which she herself becomes the R&B flâneur: observing, admiring and desiring the female object.
Like her Odd Future compatriot Frank Ocean, Bennett’s queerness – something hinted at by her shaven-headed, skatewear-clothed appearance and confirmed in lyrics, videos and interviews – is relevant in the context of R&B, the genre in which she and Ocean both operate. It is one that has been dominated by sex and sensuality, but, like much pop, also characterised by their less appealing derivatives: raunch, restrictive heteronormative romantic tropes, as well as a certain falsettoed masculinity whose effeteness only serves to reinforce its aggressive virility. In singing about sex from a female, gay perspective, Bennett strips the style of its more discomfiting baggage – in Got Her Own, for example, she crushes on a financially independent woman – without ever making that seem remarkable.
In fact, subtlety is Fin’s watchword. The way Bennett’s perspective as a gay woman understatedly tinkers with the traditional R&B template is a microcosm of what she does on a wider sonic scale. Languid rapping, snappy trap snares, odd synths, and occasionally dissonant production supplement a sensual, soulful and astonishingly accomplished selection of songs that more often than not give the impression of being suspended underwater, cloaked in a distance and inertia that makes their captivating core accessible only with repeated listens – Know, for instance, is like an Aaliyah and Timbaland collaboration once removed from reality. It’s a style that demands attention – not through desperate ploys to get notice, but the opposite: a distinct lack of immediacy.
Bennett isn’t alone in this regard. This kind of approach to R&B – a tendency towards subtlety, complexity and experimentation that delays gratification until at the very least three listens in (a sound that has been labelled “alternative R&B”, to the chagrin of those who point out the genre has always been curious and pioneering) – is something the music industry currently has coming out of its ears, with industry behemoths like Beyoncé and Rihanna having ditched their obvious and frequently abrasive pop for it, long-time purveyors of the ideal like Solange and Ocean finding their feet and a raft of critically tipped young artists (many of them, such as Nao, Jorja Smith and Ray BLK, being British) establishing themselves in the midst of this new status quo.
Bennett’s petri dish, on the other hand, couldn’t have been further removed from this tastefulness – and perhaps it’s that which makes the record feel more like a reasoned stylistic choice than a nod to the zeitgeist. The Angeleno first came to notice as part of Odd Future, the controversial hip-hop collective that hit the headlines at the turn of the decade, primarily for the strange and disturbing rap of founding member Tyler, the Creator – whose favoured ghoulishly distorted vocals echo faintly around Fin – as well as the group’s general air of unsettling insouciance. In many ways the outfit were the closest thing to punk that mainstream music had encountered in recent memory. Bennett ended up as the group’s producer, then DJ, after she invited Tyler and Matt Martians – both of whom she had discovered and subsequently contacted through MySpace – to use the recording studio she had constructed in her parents’ guesthouse while experimenting with music production as a teenager (she had decided she wanted to produce music at an early age, an idea partially inspired by her uncle Mikey Bennett, who co-wrote Shabba Ranks’s Mr Loverman). Then, in 2011, Bennett left to form the Internet with Martians. She moved from a technical role to vocalist and songwriter, and created tracks that encompassed soul, hip-hop, R&B and funk (they have cited Jamiroquai as an influence apparently without irony).
The funk surfaces again here during an irresistibly groovy interlude on closing track Insecurities, which sees the protagonist end a relationship in which she was overlooked and unloved – an act informed by hard-won and still tenuous self-esteem. Lyrically, it’s remarkably nuanced: Bennett is besotted by her lover, but belatedly enlightened enough to “rebuke [her] evil ways”, telling her, with barely detectable bitterness over skidding, synthetically truncated beats, to “thank my insecurities” that the relationship ever happened in the first place.
Like the rest of this album, effortless sophistication gradually oozes out of this finale. As hinted at by the record sleeve’s oceanic shadows, Fin has depths that only become more apparent the longer you spend engulfed in them.
