He even wrote a song about it, which appears on his new album, Strange New Past. 'I feel all right, I'm feeling better than before/If this talk was any smaller it won't fit me any more'.

"I just hate that I can't honestly tell them. If you go, 'I'm depressed, I haven't been out of bed in a week and I've had to summon up all my energy just to get out of the house, and it's so lovely that you would ask me that and thank you so much,' they don't want you to say that, they're like, 'What have I got myself into?' ''

But they say your greatest weakness is also your greatest strength. Sentry's inability to deal with small talk is probably what makes him such a good MC. "Yeah, maybe," he says. "No one wants to hear small talk MC, do they?" he chuckles. "Just rapping about the weather and shit..."

Sentry tackles some topics on his new album that are a bit darker and more personal than anything he's released before. "It just felt good to do that, to get that out of me," he says. "Last time I set out to write a dark album as well, and it just didn't eventuate. This time I kind of stuck with it. I mean, I don't think it's a dark album but I definitely got to broach a few topics that I've never done before. A lot more personal stuff, you know."

Like the track Violin, which is about his father. 'The other night I had a dream that you apologised/And you became honesty personified/ I ain't seen you in the longest time/So I just woke up and started writing what was on my mind.'

"That was a really hard track to write," Sentry says. "It was something I'd wanted to do for ages and it was just really hard to word perfectly. I think I wrote about 10 different whole songs for that beat. Different ways of broaching it and different levels of intensity." It's one track he thinks will drop off his live playlist. "I think I feel a bit too vulnerable or something on that one."

He's about to go on a regional tour. "My manager just had this idea; he just wanted to do this colossal regional tour. I really enjoy going out to the regional areas and after doing that for so long you just work out a way that you can just do it all in one insane, big hit."

As usual, he'll be playing computer games on tour to entertain himself. "Do you know what pelican cases are? A pelican case is just the roadie's case, like all your instruments and microphones and all your shit you put in this big, hard case: they're indestructible. You can submerge them in water, you can shoot them with a shotgun, you can run over them with a car, they just don't break. And they've got this foam lining that you can just design and fit to specific sizes so I've just been making the perfect pelican case for my X-box. You've gotta have a thing."

When: July 3, 9pm

Where: Academy Nightclub, Civic.

Tickets: $30 + BF available from moshtix.com.au