Culture Cabinet

From the moment we start our interview, Sizzy Rocket is already laughing at how impossible it is to compress her life into a neat little intro. “Oh my gosh. I’m like, ‘How much time do you have?’” she says when asked to give me some background on her journey as an artist so far. It’s the kind of line that tells you immediately she’s lived ten artist lifetimes already. Her early days were New York chaos and self-creation, a college student absorbing the early taste of what it meant to be a professional musician.  

“I was living in New York. I went to NYU, so that’s really where I became Sizzy Rocket,” she says, citing Andy Warhol, Patti Smith, David Bowie, and the CBGB lore as the alchemy that sparked her identity. Meanwhile, she spent eight years in a publishing deal that turned out to not be the initial dream come true that she had once thought, even if it gave her the opportunity to sharpen her teeth in sessions and learn the industry from the inside out. But she’s adamant that her actual artistic beginning came way later. “I feel like my true start, when my true independence began, was with my album, Grrrl, in 2019,” she says. She describes that record as “a queer coming-of-age love story.” From there, the momentum didn’t stop. “I put out an album [ANARCHY] in 2020 during the pandemic, which is wild. And I put out an EP in 2023 called RAT, because I started partying a lot and going to all the gay clubs, and I wanted to make something for the gays. And now we’re here.”

Her instincts don’t wait for permission. When pop sensation Kesha announced her SMASH project, an online community that aims to connect budding songwriters and artists to set them up for success in a notoriously adversarial industry, Sizzy didn’t spend a second wavering. “I woke up, I saw the announcement, and I was like, ‘I know exactly what I’m doing today,’” she says. She immediately downloaded the track and locked in with violent creative clarity. “I was just really thinking about the song. It’s is called ‘ATTENTION!.’ The whole campaign is, ‘Do I have your attention?’ How can I really nail that message? How can I embody that?” The opening line hit her like a hit of electricity: “I’m about to bust out of my latex,” inspired by a bodysuit she owns that happens to be the exact same one Kesha wore on tour. “I was locked in clearly that day,” she laughs, “but I really felt like I wanted to seize that moment.”

It wasn’t some polished studio production either. “The vocal that you are hearing [on the track] is the vocal that I just recorded in my room,” she says. “They kept the guitar solo at the end, and I also recorded that in my bedroom that day.” When Kesha invited her to dinner afterward, Sizzy tried to play it cool. “I was just trying to, like, be cool and not starstruck,” she admits, but what actually left a mark was witnessing the kind of survivor she wants to become. “She just walks the walk… having her to look up to as this woman of resilience and strength and freedom and ownership has just been so powerful.”

Her own artistic identity solidified during another headline moment: releasing Grrrl. “I always felt like I had to be someone else or do something that didn’t feel genuine to me to have success,” she says of her earlier years. That album flipped the switch. “It felt like taking my power back. It felt like becoming who I really am.” And it wasn’t just a personal breakthrough, it was the first time she felt her audience lock in with her. She still remembers the DIY tour that followed with almost spiritual clarity: “We booked that tour ourselves and played really run down, shitty DIY venues, but it wasn’t about that,” she says. “I remember being on that tour and just being like, ‘Oh, this is the most special one.’”

Special, sure. But, from an outsider’s perspective, it’s inspirational. Sizzy Rocket is the kind of artist who builds the machine herself when the machine won’t let her in. “It started out of necessity,” she says of her go-getter attitude. “I literally have no video budget. Like, cannot afford any production. So like, I’m gonna have to learn how to do this myself.” She learned editing. She learned color grading. She learned how to shoot and cut and communicate in the visual language the modern music landscape demands. “[I had to learn] the way to communicate with [listeners] and tell them the story of who you are as an artist, through video edits, through story times,” she says. “Whatever it is I’m doing, the message is still there and it’s being received.”

Her songwriting splits into two creative lives: the self and the conduit. When she writes for herself, she’s blunt: “I’m a very expressive person. My art and my music is about expressing yourself.” Writing for others requires disappearing. “I don’t want to make it about me,” she says. “I try to leave all of that behind and hone in on their [the listeners’] world.” Though, she genuinely loves both modes. “I love doing both. I can’t imagine my life without both.”

Now she’s deep in album four (with a new single out now), elbows-deep in drafts and chaos and ideas that haven’t fully ossified yet. She tries to find the words in real time. “I have been writing and writing and writing. I have a note in my phone full of songs, and I know which songs are going to be on this next album,” she says. “It’s a really insane story, and it’s going to be a ride.” The visuals are still forming, still blurry around the edges, but the timeline is non-negotiable. “It’ll be next year. I’m manifesting that. It has to be next year,” she says with a laugh. 

And if you ask what she wants people to feel when they hear the next album, or when they hear anything she makes, her answer is immediate and self-assured. “I just want people to feel inspired. I want people to feel something,” she says. She doesn’t sugarcoat her frustration with the state of things: “A lot of music coming out right now, in general, is kind of mid and numb feeling and like it kind of all sounds the same.” Her mission is the opposite of numb. She wants ignition. “I hope that my music stands out and makes you feel something and makes you want to run through the street and scream and be free. Yeah, be free.”

Listen to more of Sizzy Rocket here.