Ledbyher

Rachel Aisyah Diack has packed a lot into her short time on planet earth. By the age of six she’d lived on an army base in Germany, a rainforest village in Indonesia and a small town in rural Norfolk. Since then, she has studied poetry, slept on a bright-pink moped called Betty the Clitoris, trained as a filmmaker and saved several lives as a lifeguard.  Every chapter of her story, however unlikely, has found its way, however nebulously, into her music.

Over the past three years, the Indonesian Scottish musician – better known as Ledbyher – has established herself as one of the UK’s most exciting emerging artists. A rapper, singer, songwriter, poet, producer, and video director, this multitalented creative is entirely self-taught and has achieved her growing success against all odds. She has carved out a musical identity that is as invigorating as it is uncompromising. It has won her admirers such as Lola Young and Skepta, and collaborators including Sainté, AJ Tracey and Biig Piig. Proof of her mounting popularity is evidenced in a rapidly growing online and IRL fanbase, with 200,000 monthly listeners on Spotify and a sold-out London show.

Ledbyher’s influences are similarly dynamic: Shakespeare and English Romantic poetry; Pedro Almodóvar, Kelly Reichardt and David Lynch; Slipknot and Lana Del Rey; UK drill crews Harlem Spartans and M24. These iconoclasts, and more, have inspired Ledbyher as potently as solo wild camping trips, Ted Talks lectures, YouTube Shamans and her Grandmother Sylvia. What ties these seemingly disparate spheres together is an instinct for mood, texture, tone and storytelling. Ledbyher’s work feels inexorably her own: deeply literate, defiantly emotional, and beautifully intangible.

Unpredictable yet deliberate, romantic yet raw, Ledbyher is part of a lineage of artists who turn life’s chaos into vision – and like Björk, Bowie, or Kate Bush, Ledbyher is carving a world that is strange, beautiful, and entirely her own.