In a day and age where young musical prodigies are at an all time high (see Justin Bieber, Martin Garrix, Porter Robinson) we tend to forget that us Aussie folk are blessed with quite the music industry ourselves.
And it now seems as though we’ve found our very own ripe youthful talent in an artist named Mallrat, who admits that her school marks significantly suffered (for the right reasons, of course) once she decided to take a serious dive into the muso life.
The self-proclaimed Hannah Montana of the rap game, Mallrat is the young Aussie MC who has secretly been taking the country by storm.
Citing the early Black Eyed Peas as a major influence in her rap roots, Mallrat has since added names ranging from Skrillex and Crystal Fighters, to MØ and Frank Ocean, as her overall influences. Combine that with her top-notch catalogue of tropical house, R&B, deep house and Wave Racer-esque future bass (just to scratch the surface), and we’ve got a girl who doesn’t appear to be bound to any single genre.
She has a singing voice decently beyond her years, vocally sounding well into her 20’s, yet realistically just cracks her late teens, which makes a lot more sense of cheeky Facebook updates such as “I look like I do a lot of drugs, but actually I just have scruffy hair, bad skin and a grubby dress sense”.
While she’s been bulk-memorizing lyrics since the age of 12, Mallrat doesn’t see herself as a rapper, claiming only to “write raps and then sing them.” However, her Tigerilla-produced track Suicide Blonde taps some serious Tkay Maidza vibes at points, leaving us wondering whether she legitimately doesn’t rate her rapping ability, or if rather this was all just a moment of humility.
Maybe the fact that Allday’s music pushed the Brisbane-bred artist to start writing herself, or that her first real gig was alongside him, or that she still sees the Aussie hip-hop talent as a major influence among many larger and more accomplished artists, can each say a little something about the rap and trap styles consistently weaving through her music.
Recently she performed as part of the 120-artist strong BIGSOUND lineup, alongside Aussie rockers DZ Deathrays, Dro Carey collaborator KUČKA, and recent GOOD Music signee Young Tapz among many others.
Mallrat brought all of her closest friends out to catch the big performance which was met with nothing but acclaim, blowing the minds of the Happy team and the most of the other crowd members alike. Reviews of her show spoke highly of her live presence, the performance quality of recent EP Uninvited, and projected a big future for the (at the time) 17-year old artist.
As this young gun leaves the stresses of school behind to give herself completely to her art and propels off the back of her recent performances along with the momentum of her mid-year EP release, it really feels like Mallrat can do no wrong as she travels full speed ahead towards a promising career in music.
So where to from here? Well a gig at Splendour In The Grass, plus a collaboration with Kanye West or Miike Snow wouldn’t go astray, at least that’s what the teen rap-enthusiast reckons.
On a more realistic note, if you’d like to catch her live before the year’s out she’ll be rocking it at The Plot festival, as well as tagging along to the Thundamentals national tour with fellow Aussie rapper, Pez.
On top of that, there was a mention of writing new music amongst all of this, meaning we may just see that full length work of rap/trap/house/tropical/whatever the heck bangers at some point in the near future, one can only hope.
Grab your tickets to The Plot here.
Read:
Check out Mallrat on our list of best new Australian bands in 2016.
