ALEXANDER MCQUEEN coat, shirt, pants, and boots and CHROME HEARTS necklace, and talent’s own pearl necklace.

What does heartbreak sound like and where does love go when it dies? I hope there is a place it can still exist beyond the last goodbye. Because wouldn’t it be a waste if it all just disappeared? Singer and songwriter, Syd, creates sounds and lyrics that, among other things, delicately bottle the essence of heartbreak. She tells stories of longing and naïveté within every chord, sewing the nostalgic ache in between syllables and lines of a verse—a reminder that nothing is more tender or true and has the capacity to hold heartbreak than a love song.

The newly turned 30-year-old LA-based artist found her first true love through her mom, whose alphabetized CD collection continues to lend inspiration to this day. There wasn’t a time when Musiq Soulchild‘s Aijuswanaseing and Erykah Badu’s Baduizm and Mama’s Gun weren’t on the stereo, wafting through the hallways and windows of her childhood. Over a decade into her musical journey, Syd has mastered the art of metamorphosing emotion, wisps of dreams, and longing into elegantly sentimental melodies—in the process substantiating a cohesive autonomy over her identity as a solo artist.

SALVATORE FERRAGAMO top, CELINE jeans, ALEXANDER MCQUEEN boots, CHROME HEARTS belt, necklaces, bracelets, and ring

Formerly Syd Tha Kyd, as featured in the alternative hip-hop collective, Odd Future, and piloting her own exploration into R&B with her band, The Internet, in 2011, it wasn’t until the beginning of 2017 that she debuted her first solo collection of work entitled Fin—full of her softly-whispered confessions. She followed with her three-track EP, Always Never Home, shortly after. This Spring, Syd debuted her sophomore album, Broken Hearts Club, to which she is currently touring across the US. The album presents itself as an invitation, where each song acting as an open hand to her fellow heavy-hearted companions. Acoustic strings meet with 80s R&B motifs to idealize a lush soundscape of hushed tones and sincere beats.

Broken Hearts Club—the lucky thirteen-tracked effort—unveils the intimacies and contradictions of her first love and the distraught that inevitably follows after its dissolution. The album is filled with the high-highs with “Fast Car,” the low-low depths with “Missing Out,” and finally, sweet acceptance with “Goodbye My Love.” Syd confesses, “When I started the album, it was about the relationship I was in at the time. I wrote a bunch of love songs. I was so in love—we were so in love.” The results see Syd, a true romanticist, gently impart the depth of this love and its convergence with the bitter-sweetness of losing it—something we perhaps know all too well.

OFF-WHITE jacket, LOEWE shirt, AMIRI pants, LOUIS VUITTON shoes, VOGUE BOYZ pearl necklace, and CHROME HEARTS necklace.

Yes, we fall and then are forced to forget, only to fall again, but nothing is as gripping as the very first. “It was my first real heartbreak, I think,” Syd considers. “I didn’t see the breakup coming, because it didn’t stem from anything that had to do with me.” Confounded and confused, she began to transpose what she was feeling into stories, poetry, and lyrics. “I started getting dark and it sounded so bad—it wasn’t me. I realized I needed to wait until I was in a better place to start reflecting on it.” She remembers fondly, “My mom always used to say, ‘You can’t see the picture if you’re standing in the frame.’ That’s exactly what it was.”

And when we find ourselves in the mud? We must return to our younger selves who always loved playing in its rain. “I started reading again,” Syd continues, “which was something I did a lot more as a kid. I started sitting outside in the sun, you know, in the grass.” As Syd let her body absorb tendrils of Vitamin D, she was slowly allowing the time and the days in between heal her spirit. And one day, as the fates promised, she found love again. This time, she entered the unequivocal space with a different perspective, one that revolved around her newly found autonomy and acceptance of the turning tides. She expresses how this enabled her to be more present, “I started to embrace impermanence.”

When recording Broken Hearts Club, Syd admits, “I think the hard part, if anything, was getting the pain across, because I wasn’t in it anymore. By the time I wrote and recorded the breakup songs on that album, I wasn’t hurting anymore.” Her most serene track on Broken Hearts Club, “Goodbye My Love,” is a four-line epilogue written in the height of woe, when she finally learned it was time to say goodbye. When the time to record came, she shares that it was “almost like a sign of the times,” as she found that those feelings of the past and loss could no longer touch her. She professes, “Recording ‘Goodbye My Love’ was like a test almost. Because when I wrote it, I couldn’t sing it without crying. So, when I recorded it without crying, it was like, ‘Wow, I’ve moved on.’”

Forward movement can mean getting pulled in countless directions, but Syd remains stoic—attuned to the never-ending and perpetual turn of the earth. With her baby out in the world, she shares, “I wanna try and be present and just really enjoy my journey more. I feel like I’ve put in the work, I spent my twenties working, my head down, just putting in the work, paying the dues. And now I just wanna do what makes me happy.” With the rhythm of the present undergoing its ebbs and flows, and with the planets constantly moving in and out of retrograde, I ask her how she copes? The response, said with a laugh, solidifies her intentions, “I usually don’t notice the retrogrades—I find out after they happen. I’m down to partake, but usually, it doesn’t really hit me. Maybe it’s because I’m so present.”

No matter how hard we try, we can’t keep our hearts safe, as much as we can’t stop hoping that the next one will be different. In our 20s, we are just old enough to have been visited by trauma, yet still young enough to repeat mistakes— keeping the door open enough for people who perhaps ought not be welcome to sometimes creep in. As Syd demonstrates, we can’t process this and move forward appropriately without first finding our present.

As she sings—finally healed, with positive momentum propelling her forward—on the final version of “Goodbye My Love:”

I suppose this is goodbye, my love
Maybe we’ll see a new dawn, my love
Just wasn’t destined to work for us
We had to put ourselves first once.

One day—when and if you find yourself ready to fall again—welcome to the club.