Your twenties will do this to you. Everything looks good on paper but you’re still awake at 3am running worst-case scenarios you didn’t ask for. You’re in something real that has its own weight and warmth and then this question just arrives uninvited and won’t leave: what if it ends? I’ve asked that about jobs, about friendships, about relationships I was desperately trying to hold onto while one part of me was already doing the math on what comes after. You want to commit fully but you keep an emergency exit in the back of your mind just in case. That duality is fucking exhausting to live inside and almost nobody talks about it honestly. Sidney – a Melbourne-based indie-pop songwriter – built an entire EP around that space. what if it ends? was written in the year leading up to the end of her own engagement, while everything looked stable from the outside and the questions were getting louder from the inside. Collaborating with names like Jim Alxndr (who has worked with Carly Rae Jepsen) and Karina Savage of Glades, she shaped something warm and confessional, the kind of record that sounds like conversations you should be having or wish you’d had with everyone you’ve ever been too scared to be honest with — including yourself.
The EP opens with ‘Sliding Doors,’ written one week before Sidney ended her engagement. One week. That context changes everything. She’s laying out a full life she can nearly see: “there’s a red wine stain underneath the couch / coz we made a home / we built it all.” She’s picturing the kids two doors down and names carved into concrete. She wants to want it all the way and she almost does. The uptempo production keeps her moving through both versions of the future fast enough that she doesn’t have to stop and feel either one completely.
The chorus is where it gets uncomfortable. “I’ll shout your last name / ’til it feels mine baby / I’ll convince myself / these sliding doors won’t change me.” She’s performing the certainty ahead of actually feeling it, hoping repetition will close the gap. “Will I love the way it sounds” sits right in the middle of what should be a love song and quietly unravels it. She wrote this while she was still in it, still hoping the answer would come on its own. It’s devastating without ever announcing itself.
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From there the record goes airborne. ‘Long Haul’ uses a red-eye flight as the frame for what’s really happening in her relationship — she’s an Australian artist touring American cities, and somewhere over one of them, 30,000 feet up, too exhausted to perform okay-ness and too wired to sleep, the question she’s been successfully avoiding is right there in the seat next to her with nowhere to go. “The questions on the table / we hardly wanna face ’em.” The production has this late-night low-pressure quality – warm and a little claustrophobic which is exactly what it feels like to be trapped in your own head mid-flight. I had a relationship once that I processed entirely in airport terminals. This song took me back there immediately.
What makes ‘Long Haul’ land is the refusal she’s holding onto. ” I’m not looking for the exit / I’m never gonna forfeit. “ She’s holding herself and the relationship at the same time, refusing to sacrifice one for the other. ” Don’t make me choose over me and you. “ That line is the whole damn thing. She’s asking the relationship to wait while she figures out who she is inside it, which is the most honest ask you can make, and also, as she eventually found out, the one that sometimes can’t be answered.
‘Golden Boy’ is quieter and more uncomfortable. This is the song about using closeness to delay a conversation neither of them is ready to have. ” It’s late and you’re holding my body / and it’s nice but I know it’s not helping. “ She knows. Fully. ” Can we just make out ’til it’s over? / Can we just keep holding our breath? / ’cause that way we’re both distracted / and we won’t see how this ends. “ If that doesn’t sit somewhere specific in your chest you’ve never been in a relationship that was quietly outgrowing itself.
The bridge is where she catches herself: “I’m both anxious and avoidant / what a winning combination / oh the girl gets a golden boy / screws him over, won’t let him go / let him go.” She knows what she’s doing to him and cannot make herself stop because the alternative is admitting out loud that their timelines stopped matching up somewhere. “Can we just play cards and stay friends” is the whole relationship ending in one line.
Then the record shifts completely and gets personal in a different way. ‘The Difference’ is the most emotionally exposed moment on the EP and it has nothing to do with the relationship. Sidney’s father received a depression diagnosis and she found out second-hand. She walked into a room and saw the medication on the table before anyone said a word, and this is the song she wrote from that moment. “If you had’ve held my hand through the pain / oh the difference that would’ve made / known you had demons while I had the same.” That last part is the gut punch. Two people in the same family carrying the same darkness without ever finding each other inside it. She recorded it at her parents’ house and left the vocal as the demo take, completely untouched, because some songs only have one honest shot. It shows.
That’s where the song could have ended, but Sidney keeps pulling the thread. She asks “was it so hard you couldn’t say? / did you think I wouldn’t see you the same?” and then answers it herself in the next breath with a word that stops everything – “Volatile I couldn’t see it.” That’s a self-assessment and a painful one. She had her own chaos running underneath and somewhere inside that acknowledgment is the dawning realization that her father may have been carrying his diagnosis quietly because he was trying to protect her from one more thing to carry. “We shared a mind, not just a name” closes the song and opens everything back up. I’ve had moments like that with people I love and this song made those experiences feel like a door neither of us knew was closing.
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‘Anything’ pulls you back into the relationship but from a different angle. This is bone-deep exhaustion, the specific kind that comes from talking yourself back in every single time you almost get out. She’d give anything to go back to the driveway, “couple weeks in / a look on your face / no answers needed.” Before the questions arrived. Now she’s watching other people be in love like it’s simple and feeling like she missed a class everyone else attended. The line ” I know you need closure but I need the pain “ is where she catches herself completely and still can’t move. That’s a damn uncomfortable thing to put into a song.
The title track closes things out and earns its place at the center of the record. ‘What If It Ends?’ is the most up-tempo track on the EP which is a hell of a choice for a song built on existential panic. The fear here isn’t losing something. It’s succeeding so completely that the version of herself she built toward doesn’t recognize the life she’s in. “This life doesn’t know me, the way that it did once.” She’s close. She can feel it. And it feels like a threat. ” No I don’t want to have to begin again / I don’t know where I’ll go if this isn’t it. “ The anxiety found better material to work with.
“Songwriting has always been my safe space to feel things fully, especially when I didn’t have answers yet,” Sidney says. “This project allowed me to sit in the questions without rushing to fix them and hold space for two truths at once. To love someone and still not be happy. To feel proud and terrified at the same time.” That’s the architecture of what if it ends? in one breath. Every track is someone holding two true things and refusing to force a resolution she isn’t ready for. Her 2023 EP Sore Loser earned triple j Unearthed Track of the Day and a sold-out Melbourne headline show. Her stripped-back covers have crossed 13 million views and have soundtracked weddings across the world. She’s shared stages with Angus & Julia Stone and The Rubens. Sidney has been building toward this, and what if it ends? is where everything clicks.
That emergency exit you keep in the back of your mind during your twenties? Sidney turned it into seven songs that asked the question out loud and figured out that the asking was the answer all along. I’ve been running my own version of these questions for years and I still don’t have a clean answer for any of them. This record made me feel less insane about that. Maybe that’s the whole point.
