Between trauma and triumph, Mallrat made her best album yet

Last May, about a month after Mallrat finished recording her remarkable new album, Light Hit My Face Like a Straight Right, her younger sister, Olivia, died, aged 21. This weekend, a day after the album’s release, she begins her stint as the national support on Kylie Minogue’s Tension arena tour, her largest gigs to date, ahead of her own headline tour to come in April. Even from a distance, the dissonance between such personal loss and professional accomplishment feels discombobulating.

“I feel a lot more normal now than I did a few months ago, so I feel like I’m able to be excited for these things now,” the musician, real name Grace Shaw, says from her home in Collingwood. Bundled in front of her laptop, her white jumper falling from her shoulder, the 26-year-old is funny and generous during our interview. Months ago, she couldn’t even fathom doing this sort of thing – the requisite press cycle, a necessity in bolstering pre-release attention for any new album – again.

“When all these things were in the early stages of being planned last year, I felt quite disconnected from the idea that they might happen and that I would be, like, talking about myself and about music. That all felt like an impossible or really unnatural thing. It still feels a bit unnatural, but it’s possible at least,” says Shaw.

“The most jarring thing about releasing music is stuff like this,” she gestures back and forth between us. “It just feels so strange to be doing that when you’re like, how can I talk about myself right now when I want to hide under a rock?”

“I think it’s sometimes nice to get songs out of your system so that you can move on to the next thing”: Shaw pivots to dense club music on her new album.

In an interview with The Guardian this year, Shaw said the album and music didn’t feel important at all for a while, an unambiguous response after such grief. Almost a year on, how has she recaptured her enthusiasm?

“I think a lot of it was just time. Usually, I wouldn’t be able to bear waiting that long to share music I’ve made, but I think the space between now and then has actually been a good thing,” she says. “Also, sharing music and seeing people’s reactions to it made me realise that it has an effect on the world sometimes, and that it gives me purpose.”

Music has been Shaw’s purpose for more than a decade now, ever since she released first single Suicide Blonde at the age of barely 16. Instantly a bubbling indie star at home, beloved for her icy evocation of generational unease, her debut album Butterfly Blue, released in 2022, expanded her profile exponentially, earning acclaim internationally and peaking at No.6 on ARIA’s albums chart.

Part of that album’s appeal was the single Surprise Me, a collaboration with her hero, American rapper Azealia Banks. But recently, even that brought its own unexpected ordeal.

Last October, Banks – ever brutal in her online missives (just ask The 1975’s Matty Healy) – appeared to disparage the collaboration (“no shade but if I can collab with f—ing mallrat, I can definitely do a song with doechii and doja cat,” Banks wrote on X) and Mallrat’s aesthetic choices (“that death metal graphic design aesthetic mallrat had was like 4 years played out by time she had it and it did not even match the sound of her music at all,” Banks wrote). Did the criticism, sudden and out of nowhere as it was, sour the collaboration? Or is it a badge of honour at this point to be the ire of a trademark Banks takedown?

“Well, you know, all she said was that my font didn’t match my music, which that’s the point. I love misleading people,” Shaw says with a laugh. Even now, she has no animosity towards the artist who first sparked her musical awakening.

“My first album I ever bought was Broke with Expensive Taste, which was her first album, and I had her mixtapes as well. All of those things shaped my love of music and my taste in production. That [collaboration] was a full circle moment for me, this feeling of, ‘Wow, this is really cool and I’m where I’m meant to be.’ Even at kickboxing this morning, I was still listening to Azealia Banks,” Shaw laughs.

If the pressure of following up a breakout debut – or, for that matter, contending with Azealia Banks’ unprovoked rancour – has sunk other artists, Shaw’s been unfazed. Light Hit My Face Like a Straight Right is her best album yet, ambitious in scope and adventurous in the way it approaches songs like soundscapes, the lingering influence of heroes such as Sophie. The skittering trip-hop of Ray of Light, produced by Styalz Fuego, is drenched in heavy reverb as though emerging from underwater, while the odd techno of Love Songs/Heart Strings, produced by Casey MQ, the Montreal producer whose mystical work with French singer Oklou is earning internet raves, is a delightfully weird burst of chopped up vocals and off-kilter beats.

“I think it’s sometimes nice to get songs out of your system so that you can move on to the next thing,” says Shaw of the leap she’s taken with Light Hit My Face. “Those more live-sounding acoustic songs I’ve done, even though that’s not something I’m going to stop doing, it was cool to be able to switch lanes a bit and hone in on a more dance-influenced sound.”

Underlining the album’s weirdo appeal is Shaw’s idiosyncratic touch, her crate digger’s sensibility for unlikely sources and deep web ephemera. A sample of obscure Memphis phonk pioneer DJ Zirk’s Born 2 Lose appears on Pavement (somehow buffeted by a sample of her friends Cub Sport’s Beg U) and again on the should-be pop smash Hocus Pocus. “I think that’s the driving force behind what I’m excited about in production,” says Shaw of her fondness for sampling. “There’s an element to it of sharing something I love, but in a new context and in a way of my own. It’s like, ‘Hey everyone, look at this thing that I love, I hope you love it too.’”

They’re also deeply personal obsessions. The lilting influence of Irish folk songs (don’t get Shaw started on “major pentatonic melodies”) – inspired by childhood days when Shaw’s grandparents would look after her and her sister and they’d “all watch Riverdance together” – permeates the album so heavily that, in the album’s liner notes, Shaw suggests that a special secret – “only for Irish people” – is hidden in the album’s opener, My Darling, My Angel. What is it, I ask?

“Are you Irish?” Shaw replies.

Unfortunately, no. I’m a Spanish Morán, I explain, with an accent on the “a”. But our people probably mingled at some point in history. Does that count?

“No, sorry,” Shaw deadpans. “I was thinking maybe you’d be like Dylan Moran and you’d be Irish.” She refuses to reveal the secret.

The album’s closer, Horses, is a sort of spiritual outlier, a fingerpicked folk song co-written with Alice Ivy, in which Shaw reflects on home and her upbringing in Brisbane in biblical, almost apocalyptic terms – “the river will swallow this whole city up,” she sings. For someone whose early work was so aligned with Brisbane’s suburban malaise, what does she think of the Blueyfication of Brisbane? I saw a Queensland tourism ad the other day, I explain, and it didn’t even say “Brisbane” on it, it just said “Blueytown”.

“I haven’t actually watched Bluey yet. It makes me feel sick to say that out loud,” Shaw laughs. “But I love seeing Brisbane represented on TV, like with Boy Swallows Universe, I love it so much. Sometimes [Brisbane] can feel apocalyptic, but it’s also a place that’s got a lot of character and a lot of interesting people and a lot of sunshine, a lot of beautiful things going on in it as well.”

In a moving twist, Horses′ opening verse describes Shaw’s childhood days catching the train home from school with her little sister. Although the album was recorded and completed before Olivia’s death, there’s the temptation that listeners will read into the songs things and moods that weren’t intended. How does that sit with Shaw?

“I don’t mind, to be honest, because that’s the beauty of music,” she says. “Whether they read into it about me or it’s how they connect those songs to their own lives, I think that’s a special thing and the brilliant thing about art. I don’t mind how people interpret it, any sort of connection is a good thing.”

Mallrat’s Light Hit My Face Like a Straight Right is out on Friday. As well as opening for all of Kylie Minogue’s Tension tour dates throughout February and March, she will be headlining Sydney’s Enmore Theatre on April 3, Brisbane’s Fortitude Music Hall on April 4, and Melbourne’s Forum on April 5.