Meet Ledbyher, the UK rap scene’s most engaging new storyteller

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 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 21-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.”

Ledbyher’s performance persona is as enigmatic as her lyrics. But Diack is nothing of the sort: today I find her to be charismatic and goofy, constantly dishing out tales of wild nights with her “crazy” friends (two of them, she says, are “wanted kleptomaniacs”). Her stories are made more delightful when told in her nonchalant, gum-chewing conversational tone. Diack, then, has found it difficult to maintain the obscure persona that seems to be a prerequisite for the UK underground scene (think hazy visuals, cryptic Instagram posts and aloof interviews). “I've had to compromise a lot on my identity,” she says, perched on the corner of a chaise longue in her publicist’s offices. She’s cocooned in layers of upcycled Y2k clothes, bare-faced with her brunette, asymmetric pixie cut poking from underneath a baker-boy cap. “I thought I was gonna become a very vocal artist and I would speak on issues, but I know I have to wait because the underground loves mystery. You have to be a figure that people can’t get a hold of, and I’m not like that, I’m an open book.”

That’s not an overstatement. It’s not long before Diack shows me a PowerPoint presentation on her phone: her “dating wrapped”, a 12-month statistical summary of her love life. She scrolls through the slides, recounting the highs and lows of being a self-described romantic who can’t move on (she has the phrase “hopeless romantic” tattooed across her knuckles). “I’ve only dated three people before, but they’re all in my life, which makes it hard to move on,” she explains. “My brain doesn't allow it. They're just sort of always around. I see them every now and then, but I don’t know why I can’t let go.”

Diack still resides at her lively shared university house in south London, despite dropping out, while her housemates continue with their studies. The process of getting signed, I gather, wasn't an easy one. She was in high demand, but she found the rap-centric imprints to be too male dominated. “I wanted them to understand rap, but they would only have guys and it would be difficult for me to work with a team if I’m their patient zero,” she says matter-of-factly. She chose Island Records because she believes they champion women: “It was the safest and coolest in my opinion.”

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The rap scene wasn’t exactly welcoming at first. In fact, it was very lonely. “I was like, this is not really a space built for women,” she says, sipping her tea. “In my opinion, you have to work twice as hard, you have to make sure everything's on point, no mistakes... there's so much more pressure.” Diack doesn’t take her success lightly – she believes she has a responsibility to lift up other women in the same industry. So when she was asked to programme a show for the Peckham-based radio station Balamii in December, she exclusively platformed women musicians, including her sister Anjeli.

Over time, Diack has found more warmth in the rap community. EsDeeKid, the Liverpool rapper (rumoured, until recently, to be American actor Timothée Chalamet) invited Diack to his show, which she says was “biblical”. Skepta, one of grime’s foundational MCs, handpicked Diack to perform at an afterparty for his MAINS fashion show last summer. “I threw my phone across the room when he reposted my story,” she says, clearly still a little starstruck. Meeting London rapper Central Cee was another big moment, particularly as his album Can’t Rush Greatness was her most-played album of last year. She’s working with an artist she’s long admired, Lava La Rue, who hails from the DIY west-London collective Nine8. “They’re people that actually understand what I’m trying to do,” she smiles. “I’m years behind them, but I hope I get up there soon.”

Diack always needs to know her next move. Perhaps, it’s because she grew up never knowing where she’d be next. Born at the beginning of the Iraq War to a Scottish RAF pilot and a Muslim mother with Indonesian roots, Diack moved around from an army base in Germany to a village in Indonesia, then a small town in rural Norfolk. She started producing music in her teens, purely to facilitate her sister’s singing passion, but realised she had a penchant for spoken word, too. She and Anjeli would spend hours in their garden shed, where their father had built a makeshift recording booth.

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Aged 18, Diack was forced into fight-or-flight mode when she experienced homelessness after a “weird situation” involving the police, which she doesn’t go into further detail about. She remembers her friend Christina, who picked her up and took her in. “We stuffed everything I had into her Smart Car; my guitar, my laptop, my piano,” she says. “We were rushing, the environment was so unpredictable.” She’s currently in a delicate process of rebuilding her relationship with her parents, after a long period of estrangement.

The darker times in Diack’s life act as anchors for her music. That gritty gloominess, both in her sound and in her cloudy, rural music videos, are partly a reflection of how she and her Gen Z peers view the chaotic world around them. “The main feeling is that people are tired,” she says. “My friends are always trying to pull at strings, trying to hustle, make money, but it's very difficult because everything's so tiring, everything's overstimulating. That's what made me go in a darker direction [in my music] because life isn't happy. I can't be sitting making happy music.” The world feels confusing right now, but Diack is trying to make sense of it all – song by song.

‘Elephant’, the new mixtape from Ledbyher, is out on 13 February.