Ledbyher knows the haters are watching – and she loves it
Ledbyher’s breakout year captures the UK Ug scene’s current hot streak, propelled by raw energy and a sound that bounces between UK jerk, grunge and neo-soul. As she preps her debut mixtape, the white-knuckle ride shows no signs of slowing down.
As she lays waste to a banana waffle, Ledbyher is detailing the history of an early-1900s all-female crime syndicate. “They were called the Forty Elephants,” she explains with an enthusiastic bounce in a café two minutes away from her London flat. “They dressed the same as I do – long skirts and dressing like men, which I do sometimes. And they would rob the fuck out of people. They robbed Harrods!” The Forty Elephants just so happened to reside on the same street where the Norfolk-raised rapper lives now, just one of the many recurrences of the elephant that has led her to trust the signs of a higher power guiding her in the right direction. You get the sense that, with her cursive voice and authorly verse-writing, she could write a book on this stuff.
The wide-eyed, 22-year-old artist, born Rachel Diack, has had an ascendant year that epitomises the UK underground (UK Ug) scene’s current hot streak, joining the likes of Jim Legxacy, YT, Fakemink and EsDeeKid. Her raps, at times melodic and at times conversational, recall Lily Allen’s thick accent as she effortlessly flits between UK jerk, drill, neo-soul and grunge. Visually, she embodies a similar collision: beret-wearing poetry girl meets Ed Hardy streetwear, filming TikToks, lip-syncing in hanging gardens and castle ruins. Ledbyher encapsulates why the UK Ug scene is being watched globally – it’s a new creative grounding, constantly reshaped by disparate reference points.
Born in Ingolstadt, Germany, Diack settled in King’s Lynn (just “Lynn” to her), a rural, flat town in Norfolk with a median age of 47. She grew up a tomboy, hanging around the lads. “I’m happy being a woman now, but if you had asked me back then if I wanted to be a boy, I would have said yes,” she says candidly. At home, her Indonesian mother, who once dreamed of performing dance and music herself, insisted on piano lessons early on, while her sister, fellow artist Anjeli, became a YouTube cover-singing child star.
Though her parents encouraged her musical talents, Diack’s home environment was volatile, and at 13, she became a young carer when her mother was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. “I had to cook three meals a day for the whole family and figure out medication,” she remembers. “A lot of my childhood was spent in a hospital waiting on mum. I got a good look and understanding of life and death from very young.”
“I come from a long line of wild people. I just happen to be OK"
The more she explains her backstory, the more closely her childhood resembles that of Billy Brown’s in the Vincent Gallo film Buffalo ‘66. “My family is wild,” she says with extra vowels. “I come from a long line of wild people. I just happen to be OK.” Her Scottish father suffers from PTSD, having been the last surviving member of his platoon in the Falklands War, while her mother is prone to seismic outbursts stemming from dissociative identity disorder. Police were often knocking on the door. “That’s why I’m quite chill in my older years,” she posits, “because I can’t take anyone angry seriously any more.”
Family turmoil and added responsibility took a toll on Diack’s school life; she was the first in her year group to start using drugs. She quickly became known as the “druggie”, she tells me – never turning up, and when she did, leaning on the walls. However, there was one class she would always show up for. “English was my favourite class,” she says. “I really looked forward to writing a story. When I had that time, I would just write, write, write, letting my stream of thought pour from the pen.”
At 15, she started making beats on an iPad, and when her dad noticed, he helped her convert the shed into a studio. When she wasn’t spending her limited free time raving in the wetlands of the Fens, she gathered her friends into the shed to freestyle. “We’d go out into the shed, do a bunch of blow, find a Nicki Minaj-type beat on YouTube and do little raps,” she laughs. “It was rubbish, the mic would clip because we’d be screaming.” These sessions informed her earliest tracks, which frivolously depict the ordinary experiences of a teenage girl forced to grow up quickly: poor GCSE results, failing her driving test and being offered drugs at parties.
Music played a more profound role in her life when she was displaced from her home at 18. “There were just too many cases coming to the house, so the police kicked us out of our own house and gave us nowhere to stay,” Diack remembers. “I had just turned 18, so I had no rights, else I would have been given housing.” From that day, she and Anjeli were never allowed back home. Estranged and homeless, music was her lifeline. “That was peak depths of depression, I genuinely thought I would lose my mind at that time,” she enunciates. “But the more I worked at music, the happier I’d feel about it. I chased that feeling.”
Made in the understairs closet of her friend’s house, the first music to emerge from this period of turbulence, the 2023 EP Cunch, took the storytelling prose she learned in English lessons and expressed it with a commanding mew over icy, guitar-laced bedroom drill. Over the Neptunes-inspired slump of Rain, she personifies precipitation as a female figure, framing it as a conduit for her own reflection: “I can relate to the rain/ and how she hits the window pane,” she croons. “I never knew it as rapping, not until critical descriptions came,” she admits. “I just thought I was saying things. Then I was like, ‘Maybe I am a rapper.’”
Similarly, Diack didn’t realise she was stepping into the burgeoning UK jerk scene when she made Daydreaming Made Me Blue in January 2025. “In the room, I’m super heavy, I’m the elephant,” she raps on the track. “I had no idea what I was making was jerk,” she says. “It was just a beat pattern I enjoyed.” Throughout 2025, her music continued in much the same vein, including the veritably whimsical Wrong, with its Animal Crossing piano and memetic Michael Rosen sample, and her guest verses for Sainté and SINN6R, which devastate in their coolly delivered flexes. “They takin’ pictures of my fashion/ drippy with compassion, not used to getting cash in,” she pours out on Sainté’s Day in the 3.
As Ledbyher’s stature has grown, so have her detractors. “Yeah, I’ve got haters! I love it,” Diack smiles wryly. Snide comments under her TikToks draw accusations of poshness and being industry-planted because of her accent: “hunting rap”, “trust fund rap” – the list goes on. Her accent developed under the insistence of her Indonesian mother. “My mum, being a proud Asian mum, really wanted to have two very eloquently spoken young ladies with big vocabularies,” she explains. “It’s a point of pride for an Asian mother.”
Since her perceived origins and true backstory are worlds apart, she pays no mind to the vitriol online. When she allows herself to think about the deeper reasons behind it, she arrives at the male-heavy composition of the UK Ug scene. “Me being a female, lesbian, white-presenting rapper, I stick out like a sore thumb,” she explains. “I can count on my hands the amount of female rappers in the UK, and with the things people say, a lot of the discourse lands at: ‘Oh, it’s because I’m a woman.’ I have to work twice as hard for the same amount of love. I know it’s hard, but I walked into a very hard room, so it’s fine, and I’m grateful for the love and for getting to do what I love every day,” she says, running her fingers across the lid of an old piano.
Ledbyher laughs off the haters on Big Wish, a flip of Young Nudy, Playboi Carti and Pi’erre Bourne’s unreleased-but-viral Pissy Pamper, from her upcoming debut mixtape, The Elephant. A whistle-stop tour of Diack’s music-making journey, the tape’s verses were born as much from her backstory as from phrases and snippets of conversations she heard while eavesdropping on the street – just as the elephant kept appearing in passing in her life. “In songs, on TV, in conversations… it became impossible to ignore,” she says. “For me, the elephant represents a greater presence behind the music: the elephant in the room, something big you can’t ignore and ultimately immortal.”
Across 12 tracks, Ledbyher synthesises all the characters and styles Diack has toyed with previously, from the fuzzy distortion of Wraith9-style jerk to the kaleidoscopic inversions of Playboi Carti’s electronics, slowed trip-hop breakbeats and nods to the rock and grunge she enjoyed with her father. She manages to add an extra emotional knot to each of these styles. “I fear I’m on the one,” she shrugs confidently on Big Wish, but the thin string beside her reveals a genuine terror at the responsibility that entails beneath the flex.
Diack doesn’t keep a diary, so The Elephant is the next best thing. “It’s scattered from different parts of my life where I’ve needed to express something,” she explains, throwing her hands out. Cigarettes was made when she was 16 – the tale of her cool demeanour being stifled by a knockout cocktail of drugs and a girl who catches her eye. At this point, she flashes her knuckles, tatted in two rows: HOPELESS ROMANTIC.
She’s more equipped than ever to handle her voice, using the hollow drawl to make hooks grandly moving. Middle of the Elephant is like a dream team-up of Clams Casino and Imogen Heap, as diaphanous noise hurtles towards Ledbyher’s numb “aah-aah” interjections. Within the verse, she reflects on the sacrifice her mother made to give her the opportunities she has today: “So I’m sat here thinking/ I’m doing what my mumma was attempting.”
Now spending most nights enjoying the spoils of London and repairing her relationship with her family, The Elephant reflects a melodic hope, charged with the energy to prove people wrong. “Right now, there’s a euphoria in it, an ethereal quality,” she adds, though she suspects it won’t last. “After The Elephant, I see it becoming darker. I feel like I’m gonna be like… that picture,” Diack points to one next to me: a yellow-stained print of John Atkinson Grimshaw’s Blackman Street, London, 1885, which depicts the Church of St George the Martyr and rain-blurred foot traffic below a bed of green-grey clouds. Above all, the painting possesses a foreboding atmosphere, of something looming that threatens to disrupt the calm. “If I understand something fully, I get bored of it quickly. But with music, there’s a level of the unknown, and I like that.”
The Elephant is out now on Island
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