Mallrat: Driving Music | 4ZZZ Brisbane 102.1FM

- Mallrat, or Grace Shaw as she is known when not behind the mic, has come a long way since releasing her first EP as a Brisbane high school student in 2016. Still yet to turn twenty-one, this year she’s been selling out headline shows around the country and is about to head to the US on another international tour; and now she’s released her third EP Driving Music.

While theoretically Mallrat’s music is hip hop or electronic, its best bits remind me of singer-songwriters like Joni Mitchell or Suzanne Vega – simple, personal music with an eye for observational detail; whimsical but sincere; quiet yet strong in its unvarnished feminine fragility in a music world still dominated by masculine egocentricity.

The highlight is lead single Charlie, a track named after her pet dog which mixes lyrics of unrequited love with simple two-chord piano and layered vocal harmonies. The other five songs are similar but don’t quite grab the listener in the same way.

Charlie, with its chorus of “I just want coffee for breakfast, I just want warm cups of tea”, is like a follow up to Inside Voices off her debut EP and Groceries from last year’s In The Sky. Those three great songs form a kind of trilogy, each documenting the life of an introverted romantic wallflower. The ups and downs of love mixed with the comfortable idyll of home life.

That theme of unrequited love is a recurring one in Driving Music; and who can’t relate on some level to that feeling, especially when you were young, of longing after someone from afar, too afraid or uncertain to vocalise your feelings.

As uncomfortable as those times were in many ways, listening to their naive sweetness now evokes a kind of nostalgia. It’s a bit like when you happen to be out at 3pm and run into a mob of high schoolers exiting their place of learning to embark on the way home. You watch them interacting, so awkward and innocent. You catch a snippet of their conversation, and momentarily it makes you miss those days.

By the time you’ve been stuck behind them for a block, you’ve remembered how good it was to grow up, develop into your own person free from the suffocating influence of high school. How your perspective widened and you discovered issues of more ultimate significance than whether you would ever work up the courage to talk to your crush. The students dissipate and you walk on, that wistful moment fading into the air and your focus reverting to the concerns of adulthood.

- Andy Paine.