Sydney Sprague channels her sadness, anxiety, and existential dread through driving guitars, shimmering melodies, and the deceptively sweet weapons of indie pop-rock and keen observation. Self-aware with a knowing injection of dark humor, her songs summon the best of 90s alt-rock and classic power-pop without sacrificing a melancholy befitting of the end times. Her music is intimate, vulnerable, confrontational, autobiographical, and strangely uplifting. Her sophomore record, somebody in hell loves you, is as devilishly saccharine as the title implies, boldly accessible and smart. The positive press, word-of-mouth, and a stellar tour with Jimmy Eat World and Dashboard Confessional helped make organic streaming hits out of songs like “steve,” “quitter,” and “i refuse to die”; “object permanence” boasts nearly 1 million streams on Spotify alone. “As a smaller artist, it’s almost impossible financially,” Sydney says of her relentless schedule. “But I love it so much.” Sydney wrote most of somebody in hell loves you during the pandemic lockdowns, and yet, it’s decidedly less angsty than its predecessor. “And not because I’m a less angsty person,” she clarifies. “Obviously, none of us were in a good place in 2020. It was a depressing time. But I didn’t want to wallow in that. I wrote more as an exercise to distract myself from my woes.” A lot of the songs became observational storytelling, exploring the drama of people around her and revisiting her past.