Mallrat’s excellent 2016 EP Uninvited is a tough act to follow, but so far, she’s doing just fine. The 19-year-old Australian musician shared the anthemic pop track “Better” towards the end of last year, and now she’s back with a big, hip-hop-inspired, bass-heavy pop single, “UFO.”
The song features Australian rapper Allday, and this collaboration is a pretty big deal for Mallrat, considering that she says Allday was the artist who inspired her to make her own music in the first place (she also featured on his 2017 song “Baby Spiders“):
“Toward the end of high school, I was just really not wanting to go to university, that wasn’t something that was going to be right for me. I was just trying to figure out what else to do, and I started looking into this guy called Allday and then I went to one of his concerts in grade ten or eleven. That was such a game changer for me. I’m like, ‘OK, this is exactly what I want to do.’ I could see a lot of myself in him. So I started making beats on my computer and tried to make some demos on GarageBand.”
The song is set to appear on a currently unannounced release, and Mallrat says that the main difference between her current work and Uninvited is that she’s taking on a bigger role in the studio and co-producing her songs, which are happier now:
“The whole song is a reflection of me rather than just the lyrics being a reflection of me. It’s always been funny because lately, I haven’t been able to write any sad or moody songs at all. I’ve only been able to write happy songs, and I feel like often it’s the residuals of a year ago is what you write about. So, some of the real emo songs on the EP I wrote a year after I was actually sad. I don’t really know why. I think it’s takes time to process and figure out how to articulate things before you can put it in a song. It’s kind of like when you sleep, sometimes you remember things just subconsciously.”
Listen to “UFO” above, and check out Mallrat’s upcoming US tour dates below.
April 3 — Santa Ana, CA @ Constellation Room
April 4 — Los Angeles, CA @ The Echo
April 10 — Brooklyn, NY @ Rough Trade
