Seth Sentry

“I went and got these moulds done for my ears so I could get these in-ear monitors, but the chick when she was doing it cut the inside of my ear, so I’ve been literally bleeding from the ear as I’m doing these interviews. That’s added a new element to the day.”

Sentry’s music is definitely not the kind to make your ears bleed, though, and he’s hitting the road with his 1969 Campaign Trail Tour this month, promoting the fourth single from his 2015 album Strange New Past. ‘1969’ is a killer track, and its lyrical discussion of Americans getting excited over nuking the Moon (something they legit made plans to do in 1958) is eerily relevant to some of the political discourse today.

Speaking of politics, Sentry offers some advice for one fellow campaigner who’s made plenty of headlines of his own this year. “My tip to Trump would be: ‘Stop. Just stop,’” says the rapper.

Of course, if Donald Trump does get elected to the American presidency, blowing up the Moon may not be off the cards. “I wouldn’t put it past them, no,” Sentry laughs. “Or putting a big neon ‘Trump’ sign on the Moon doesn’t seem that far-fetched.”

Closer to home, and the campaigning situation is also bleak (by the time this article is published, we may or may not have our PM for the next term locked in – something no-one is particularly excited about).

“Oh man, it’s been a bit of a shitshow,” says Sentry of the Australian election campaign. “Both of them [the Australian and US campaigns] really have been pretty amazing, especially with all that ‘fake tradie’ stuff coming out – and obviously what’s happening in the States is crazy, you know? It really does show how much of an election is entertainment.”

And Sentry would know about where entertainment meets campaigning – the ‘1969’ video he released in April is framed as a presidential speech. “Basically the video clip was just one of those ones where you kinda just gotta do it; it’s gotta be a literal clip, you know? Obviously we didn’t have the Hollywood budget to do CGI Moon explosions, which would have been dope, but we kind of found a nice middle ground where we did it like the presidential address.

“It came out really good. Jeremy/Grey Ghost, who directed it, really wanted to make it look like some of those early Kennedy addresses, and I think it looks really, really great – it kinda feels like that to me. We got Sizzle, my DJ, and my drummer, Stevie Cat Jnr, to play Secret Service guards, and it was sick.”

In 2016, a key aspect of any campaign is the official hashtag. It’s an important art to master, because it allows for easy sharing of campaign material. A good hashtag needs to stand out enough to be recognised and embraced by audiences. #Sentry69 seems to have done just that, one fan even making custom #Sentry69 condoms. “Man, some dude got it tattooed like ten minutes after I announced it – it’s crazy,” says Sentry.

#Sentry69 is part of a competition where entrants represent the campaign in a photo, with the winners being flown to Sentry’s Sydney or Melbourne show to meet the man himself. But with a hashtag like that, have any of the entries needed censoring?

“Censor? Not yet! I don’t censor a lot, I let a lot slide.”

The show stops by the Enmore Theatre next week, and having already toured Strange New Past last year, Sentry wanted these dates to be “something a little bit different”.

“We’ve scrapped a lot of songs that we’ve just been doing forever, and we’re now playing a whole bunch of songs that we’ve never played before live,” he says. “We’ve got a drummer now, so it’s a cool little three-piece … We’re bringing Remi along as well, and yeah, I’m excited to come back and hit the road with something that to me feels fresh and new and challenging.”

Challenging musically, perhaps, but Sentry enjoys a luxury that most politicians on the campaign trail don’t – people actually liking his company and being nice to him.

“I love Sydney,” he says. “Man, Sydney was like one of those towns that when I was starting off, if you were from Melbourne, you’d say, ‘Oh man, Sydney’s tough,’ you know? … But we always got love from Sydney, especially ’cause we supported a crew called Horrorshow back in the day and they were from Sydney … We generally sell as many [tickets], if not more, in Sydney than we do in Melbourne, so it’s really nice. Feels like a second home, you know?”

With the tour wrapping up in August, the only solid plan Sentry seems to have after that is gaming: “A bit of Overwatch,” he says of Blizzard’s new first-person shooter. Thankfully, new music is still on the cards.

“I’ve got a bunch of songs I’ve been working on in the studio of late,” he says. “When songs are finished they’ll just be there. I’m just gonna finish them off and just put them out.

“I just wanna start writing music again … I want to start rapping just for the sake of it, you know? That’s why I got into it. I got into it because I truly love it, I’m passionate about it and that’s what I wanna do.”