Ledbyher releases new mixtape ‘The Elephant’
Ledbyher, a leading force in the UK underground primed to define 2026, releases her long-awaited new mixtape The Elephant. To celebrate, she drops new single ‘Backwards, Into U’ with a music video premiering at 5pm GMT.
The Scottish-Indonesian rapper, producer, singer-songwriter, poet and video director is a prominent female voice cutting through a male-dominated scene – and entirely self-taught. Baby elephants can walk within one hour of being born, and like the matriarchal animal which has become a recurring motif throughout her life, the 22-year-old’s rise is accelerated beyond her years but propelled by her talents. With The Elephant, she is led by no one.
Rachel Diack has been front and centre of Skepta‘s MAINS show, selling out shows not only in London but in NYC and LA, had been invited to walk for Yorisport during London Fashion Week and will be attending Gucci’s Fall 26/27 show during Milan Fashion Week on February 27th. That’s without mentioning her stand-out collaborations with Sainté and SINN6R, and her invitations to open for the likes of Biig Piig and ian earlier last year. She is an “artist’s artist” poised to become a household name for the new generation of the UK alternative scene.
Her music is an atlas of nu-wave jerk, alt-R&B and self-coined “lady trap”, but the scope of The Elephant demonstrates just how fresh and shape-shifting she is as a producer and songwriter. It captures a simmering rage unique to the female experience, and the teeth-gritted instinct for survival which drove her to fight for her seat at the table.
Speaking on releasing The Elephant and the vision behind it, Ledbyher shares: “God, it feels good to let this record go. Me and my friends have played these songs for so long at house parties, shows, on messy late night tube journeys – it’s been our big secret. It really feels like a friend I’ve been holding onto and has seen me go through so much, and now I get to set it free into the world. Bit emotional, but it’s time… fly, elephant, fly.”
The release follows on from her incendiary Boiler Room performance, an exclusive 150-cap event attended by her most devoted fans who queued for hours in the rain to get in. With surprise performances from Biig Piig, SINN6R and 5eb, fans were gifted The Elephant themed lighters, t-shirts, rolling papers and an 8-page bespoke newspaper with a QR code leading to the mixtape leak.
New single ‘Backwards, Into U’ is a track which not only reveals a fresh dimension to Ledbyher’s sound but indicates her vision for the future. The guitar guided cut is a sublime slice of rock that contains one of her favourite lines from the tape – “Heavy as the weather in my old days / When I think of it there’s always you” – which evokes the tempestuous landscape of her home in Norfolk. Her life has changed irrevocably, but she’s forever called to the place where it all began.
Sharing the story behind the track, Ledbyher says: “‘Backwards Into U’ is a little doorway back into my old days and its darker chapters. There’s something slightly haunting about hearing it for me because I made it over two years ago, but I still can remember producing it and trying to squeeze every genre I loved into one track – that’s why the drill hi-hats creep in later and the beat fully breaks down in parts. It’s probably my favourite song I’ve ever made.”
It follows on from the propulsive, future-facing single “Up 2 My Neck in U” produced by Nine8 Collective alumni Mac Wetha and Endevour. The track captures the contradicting forces she’s drawn to: vulnerability countered with crowd-igniting instinct. As each chapter of The Elephant has unfolded, we’re introduced to an artist who is eternally shapeshifting and impossible to predict from from the warped opulence of ‘Remember, Remember’ and the floor-filling single ‘What’s The Reason’.
Ledbyher’s influences are as world-spanning as her music: 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.
While studying Film at University of London, Ledbyher’s music began gaining traction after producing beats for her sister Anjeli. 2023’s Cunch really put her on the radar, and, in 2024, the sisters released a joint EP, Achy. This year, she appeared on Sainté’s ‘Days In The 3’ alongside Kairo Keyz, sold out a show at Corsica Studios before storming the Jazz Café Festival in Burgess Park. Brands including Lyle & Scott and Skepta’s MAINS have included her in their campaigns, setting Ledbyher up for an auspicious 2026.