When Rachel Diack attended her first label meeting, she stood before 20 executives, plugged in her laptop and gave a 10-slide PowerPoint outlining her creative vision. “I told them, ‘I wanna go on tour, this is how the roll out's gonna go, this is the marketing,’” the Scottish-Indonesian rapper known as Ledbyher recalls with a laugh. “My manager called me afterwards and was like… ‘They were shocked, people don’t usually do that. The first meeting was supposed to be an introduction, but I was like, ‘Who's got the HDMI cable?’”
Diack was determined to make that meeting count. It was all about The Elephant, her first release under a major label after she dropped out of university to pursue music full-time. The mixtape is an electrifying listen thanks to the 22-year-old’s rumbling drill-tinged production, shapeshifting synths and hushed vocals that have established her as one of the most exciting new stars of the UK’s underground rap scene – easily recognisable thanks to their furry fluorescent hats and stomping combat boots. “What’s The Reason” – a trap-inflected jolt that sifts through a confusing breakup with a girl who had a boyfriend the whole time – hears her rap in stuttery rhymes, “Everybody think I'm tripping for no reason / The way you love me then you leave me, it's treason.” And then there’s Diack’s more deliberately abstruse lyricism, as she sings, “I'm just tryna go from Denver to Denver / So don't think that I'm gonna send to the sender” over a trap-style beat in “Remember Remember.”
