Global Rations talks Year of La Niña
Global Rations (Randolph Fields) is an internationally published, multi-disciplinary artist whose work resists neat categorisation. Born in Atlanta, Georgia and now based in Sydney, their music is depicted through immersive feelings, potent memories, and lived experience.
We sat down to talk about their latest EP, Year of La Niña.
The conversation felt somewhat like the songs themselves – like stepping into a surrealist painting, with thoughts and patterns mingling alongside obtuse forms and abstractions.
It’s a heatwave in Sydney, and when we begin the interview, I catch them off guard by playing the opening track on the EP – Comfortable – released January 6th 2026.
“I made it — fuck. It’s so weird hearing that out loud.”
When I ask whether they built the project as individual tracks or as a collection designed to click together, it becomes apparent the first piece was survival before it was about storytelling.
“I made Comfortable for a sake, because I’m super uncomfortable. Reminding myself not to get comfortable… I needed a mantra. About feeling like I’m safe and knowing that I’m not.”
“That song always has me check in,” they tell me. “A clear – bitch – do not get too comfortable.”
What’s striking is how quickly that private mantra becomes the architecture for the whole EP. Not because they planned it, but because their life follows that same weather pattern.
“They’re all individual feelings and ideas,” Global Rations says. “And it happened to go together… It’s a soft entry and a soft exit. But in the middle is the contrast… It’s usually calm on either side. But there’s so much friction in the middle.”
That friction is where Year of La Niña lives — and not only as a title. Year of La Niña is also purposefully the name of last track, and they describe it as the point of highest risk. The most terrifying thing on the record.
“That track was the scariest part of the whole album,” they say. “I went to the studio without having any part of it actually down, but I had all these ideas in my head.”
Even the structure had to be wrestled into clarity. It was longer at first — “one verse, two verses longer, I kept telling myself it doesn’t need to be complicated,” they say. “It should be clear and simple… I wanted it to be clear.”
That push toward clarity intensifies once they start talking about what Year of La Niña is actually carrying for them. The track is anchored in a relationship that blurred calm and chaos — in a specific kind of psychological distortion that takes the ground from right under you, while everything might look fine at a glance.
“It was actually The Year of La Niña when this happened,” they tell me. They were in the back of an Uber with a person they were romantically involved with, after already being kicked out of another.
“In the personal space, things are just so wild,” they say. “But in public in front of their people, they’re like…cool. And I’m like, so confused about what’s going on.”
Then they name it. “I really understood for the first time about not even manipulation but gaslighting, because I’m like, what the fuck is going on here?”
The violence, as they describe it, isn’t only in the acts themselves but in the reversal — being harmed and then asked if you’re okay. The smoothness of the switch. The calmness you learn to adopt and just have to keep moving.
“There has to be a way to release that” they say. And I feel my body wholeheartedly agree.
“I think that song – and most of the songs – are about release,” they tell me. “Saying, who am I? Who, I’m not gonna be… What I will not tolerate.”
What’s so very clever — and ultimately brutal — is how Global Rations builds that reality into sound.
I tell them the track feels balmy, sweet, and romantic on the surface, and then leaves you feeling somehow deeply uneasy.. melancholy. They nod.
“It’s so gentle… like a metaphor for gaslighting,” they say. “You are being lulled into a place and you’re entranced by the words… I’m telling you something different, something’s wrong… It looks good. Like it should be right. But it’s not.”
They wanted the vocal delivery to enact that trapdoor; a gentle kiss that seduces you into closeness, followed by a second layer that refuses to let the truth blur.
“I think it should feel so soft… like a whisper almost,” they say. “But under that is a layer… It’s clear, it’s distorted… It’s the cleanest and clearest, the most articulate voice amongst them.”
In their mind, the engineering on the track isn’t decorative. It seems like an almost ethical choice they have made for our ears.
“I want people to get lost in that whisper, and then find the clarity they needed.”
That’s where the album title circles back. Year of La Niña isn’t just a mood – “a lot of the lyrics are talking about violence,” they say, “but concealed as weather. The weather report.”
Wetness as double entendre, downpour as bodily memory, intimacy and danger sharing the same vocabulary.
From there, the EP widens its lens.
Inner West Goofies enters the conversation, sounding easy to move to — rhythm-forward, catchy. The kind of track that can hit like a playful banger riding with your homies if you’re not listening closely.
That surface lightness is once again deliberate. The song moves fast, punchy, even though the lyrics sit somewhere far darker, circling ideas of safety, threat, and what it means to live highly alert in the place you call home.
“You have to pay attention,” they say. “The content’s important.”
As they talk through the track, they describe a way of living that’s shaped by caution — where you lay your head at night, who’s allowed to know your movements, how safety becomes something you must organise rather than something you’re given. Protection, they explain, is often assumed but rarely real.
“That protection is not for me, or anyone who looks like me,” they say, when talking about the police.
Some of the choices that follow aren’t framed as drama or rebellion, but necessity.
“You have to do something wild and egregious,” they say.
This particular project doesn’t end with the audio. They are soon releasing the Inner West Goofies music video alongside the EP, extending the same emotional logic into visual form.
“The music video has been engineered so people who are not in the minority can have a moment,” they say. “A moment inside what it feels like.”
Even after “something wild happened,” they point out, you still have to keep living — still moving through the city, still showing up, still compressing fear so other people don’t feel uncomfortable.
When we reach Shutters, they name the theme matter-of-factly.
“The black experience in colonisation, or the effects of colonisation.”
They describe the title not poetically, but mechanically: blinds closing, doors shutting, opportunity narrowing.
“You could die at any moment and it’s not your fault,” they say. “It can be as simple as you were wearing a hoodie out.”
They sharpen their body language when talking about social spaces — the performance of justice versus the reality of what people will risk when it’s close to home. They describe stepping away from an art collective they were once part of, and distancing themselves from people who don’t display consistent behaviour, because rhetoric without action becomes dangerous in real time.
“When there’s an opportunity for them to demonstrate, there’s no demonstration,” they say.
“People aren’t aware… they’ll have me in positions where I could lose my life. You can say ‘black lives matter,’ but how much? What are you really willing to put on the line?”
You can watch Shutters music video below – a visual piece they visioned, filmed and created in less than 24 hours.
We pause there for a while, and let it all sit.
Heat drifts in through the open windows, and I ask about the coming year.
“2026 feels lighter,” they add. “I have space to be playful.”
I sense some relief in their voice. We discuss music collaborations incoming, DJ sets increasing, acting opportunities on the horizon.
“I don’t ever know what I’m doing,” they share. “I’m making feelings. And however they’re encompassed at the end — that’s how it all works out.”
When I ask how they would describe themselves — producer, musician, rapper — they pause. And instead, they describe it in the only way that makes sense to them.
“I just want to put it out and see if it can transfer that feeling into the world,” they say. “Exactly how I felt it.”
Feedback becomes the test — not praise, but resonance.
“Even if they’re not saying anything about the lyrics, they felt something. And at the beginning and the end of every day, my objective is about the feeling.”
That’s where our conversation about Year of La Niña finally settles, like coming out of someone else’s vivid fever dream.
Interview by Chloe Davis-Powell.
