When Caroline Smith — A.K.A. Siiickbrain — took an electric razor to her head in 2016 she watched as several years and inches worth of traumatic memories fell limp on the floor. Her whole life of terror discarded in a bundle of brunette waves. When she'd shorn every last hair, she touched her buzz-cut head and felt the beginning of the rest of her life. The girl with the sick brain had been let loose.
Flash forward, and Smith — with her iconic, still-buzzed look — is now armed with an equally bold sound that takes influence from $uicideboy$'s dour trap, Deftones' sludgy sensuality and Bring Me the Horizon's heavy, genre-blending experiments. Starting in 2020, Smith — who had already made a name for herself as a successful fashion model — began unleashing an array of viral singles under the Siiickbrain moniker that blended caustic screams with industrial beats and catchy, indelible hooks. High-profile co-signs and collabs soon followed; and Smith found herself mixing it up with an eclectic set of artists: from BMTH, Pussy Riot and Skrillex to Maggie Lindemann, Willow Smith and others.
Last year, she expanded the Siiickbrain lore with My Masochistic Mind — her kinetic full-length debut filled with blasted-out beats and equally enticing and eviscerating vocals. Now, with her new acoustic EP, dizzy spells, she's shifting direction and sanding down her sound to reveal the rawest, most vulnerable version of Siiickbrain yet. Smith's story is one of continually stripping away fear to find new creative freedoms. And the freer she gets, the wilder, and more popular, her art becomes. But what makes this sick brain tick? The path to understanding that be-gins in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains.
Growing up on a farm in North Carolina, as a child, she loved the state's vibrant green landscape: its rivers, its flowers, the horses at the stable. She was surrounded by music. Her mother was a talented pianist and cellist, her brother a prodigy on the guitar. Everyone in her family played an instrument, and music filled the house at all hours. In the pockets of quiet moments, a young Smith wrote poetry — a skill that she found could later be transferred to her songs. Though that was several fear-filled years away.
In her preteen years, her idyllic life turned horrific. All of the evils that childhood sheltered her from suddenly emerged. She lived in what she calls an "extremely conservative" community where abuse ran rife. "I started realizing the scary parts of life," she says. "There's a lot of evil in the world."
Smith developed severe anxiety and agoraphobia, a condition that leaves a person paralyzed with fear and often unable to leave the house. As the years went by, Smith's world grew smaller and smaller. Though she'd been an adventurous child, as a teenager, whenever she tried to walk out the door she felt like she was going to faint. "I couldn't breathe," she says.
While Smith spent her days anxiety-wracked on the couch, retreating further and further from the outside world, the few friends she did have slowly but surely fell out of the picture. The only remedy was to run far, far away. And so she did the most drastic thing she could: forced herself off the couch and moved to New York City.
When she arrived, to study makeup artistry, she enrolled herself in countless hours of therapy, hellbent on breaking out of her own terrified brain. She tried a lot of medications, and eventually found one that worked. Finally in 2013, feeling somewhat regulated, she asked herself: "How about moving to L.A.?"
There, with a newfound confidence in the new city, she decided to give modeling a shot. It was at a time when brands were looking to diversify. Smith, who by that point was covered in tattoos, including one on her eyelid, was often typecast as "the crazy one." She would go on to book campaigns with global brands and appear in the pages of taste-making publications including Vogue Paris, Vogue London, and more. But it all came to a halt, of course, in 2020.
Then, not long into lockdown, tragedy struck when Smith lost her best friend to an overdose. It was a brutal wake-up call. "I just realized the harsh reality of life: It's extremely short and fragile." Music had always been in the back of her brain, a dream that teased at her; a dream that was steadily clouded over by fear. But it wasn't until the devastating loss of her friend — and the shocking realization of life's impermanence — that the singer finally shed her fears and dared to pursue music. "Finally, I woke up, and pushed myself to do the things that I actually wanted to do."
A series of serendipitous events occurred shortly after. A friend with a studio encouraged her to come over for a recording session. The moment she got in front of the microphone, Smith realized intuitively, immediately: "Yeah, this is what I was always supposed to be doing." From that session, she recorded her first-ever song, "Cigarettes and Cartier," a screaming, raging transplant of raw emotion that was a tribute to her friend. "I feel your ghost inside my head," she cried on the track. Within weeks of its release, it amassed hundreds of thousands of streams.
After only three months of recording, superstar producer and former hardcore head Skrillex DM'ed her on Instagram, asking whether she'd be interested in a collaboration. She soon found herself in his studio, learning the ropes from one of the best in the business. "TOO BIZARRE," the trap-meets-drum-n-bass banger, resulted from the session, and soon went on to rack up millions of streams.
Smith's star rose exponentially as she rubbed shoulders with Hollywood's musical elite. She be-friended alt-pop artists Willow Smith and Maggie Lindemann, both of whom share her penchant for the dark side, and she later collaborated with each musician — adding a visceral dose of cathartic rage to Lindemann's "GASLIGHT!," "break me!," "deprecating" and Willow Smith's "PURGE."
After several months of recording, Smith did her first performance alongside Lindemann, on a livestream with an audience of thousands. After only a few more performances, Smith scored her first show at an arena when she opened for Bring Me the Horizon in Brooklyn, New York. "I was terrified," she says. "But it was like boot camp for me, I learned so much." After being thrown in at the deepest end, she now has her feet firmly planted on the ground.
When we speak, Smith has just wrapped up work on her latest release, the dizzy spells EP. "It's very different from anything that I've ever done," she says of the tracks, which range from the pillowy emo rap of "when i fall" (featuring Shiloh Dynasty and No Love for the Middle Child) to the clean vocal/acoustic guitar indie folk of "when you're not mine." "I'm super excited about it," she continues. "It's the most honest and raw stuff that I've ever done."
Smith wrote the songs in her bedroom, transmuting her feelings into furiously immediate tirades. A kind of therapy. A cleanse. A way for her to process and offload the past several months' worth of professional success and personal heartbreak, loneliness and displacement.
"I went through a lot of changes within the past five months," she says. For one, she had to fire her manager (for legal reasons, she can't tell me why), while some of her relationships outside of music were beginning to strain. She began to isolate and withdraw into herself, staying at home to write. That was, until a fire in her building broke out. Her already scattered life had become almost unmanage-able, and she moved temporarily into a hotel room, where she wrote most of the EP's haunting songs. "Everything fell through the cracks," she says. "I had to scramble and try to refind myself."
It was the loneliest she'd ever felt. But with the hard reality of her life in disarray, she was forced to regather herself with intention. She cut off the people in her life who no longer fit and sliced away at her remaining fears. Smith has since re-emerged as an even more considerate and innovative artist: one unconcerned with trends or hitting it big on TikTok, but fully engaged in creating something new, something fresh. "That's what sets me apart," she says. "I'm creating things that didn't previously exist."
