Malaki’s meteoric rise raps it up for debut Galway date

You would be hard pressed to identify a more prolific Irish artist over the course of the last two years than twenty-two-year-old Hugh Mulligan, otherwise known as Malaki. Floating between hip hop and spoken word poetry, the Stillorgan rapper deals with themes of disenfranchisement and frustration with as much balance and poise as anyone else on the Irish scene. Central to Hugh’s rise has been his hunger for collaboration.

His debut album, Chrysalis, was released in November of last year and credited six artists with features including Gemma Bradley, Nealo and long-time collaborator Matthew Harris.

With such a dense catalogue built up so quickly, Hugh is now set to embark on a debut tour. He plays Galway’s Róisín Dubh on Friday, December 3 – his first time performing in the city. The tour follows his most recent release, The Light, which was launched on October 28 and features another one of the country’s fastest rising stars in Tolü Makay.

“I’ve always admired her work,” Hugh says of Tolü. “We’d never met before and I didn’t know much about her.

“With the Irish music industry at the moment, since I’m quite fresh to it, there are so many artists that you’re aware of and you support through a screen. Now I can go to shows but before, it was just supporting people on social media and stuff. It was really good to put the face to the voice because I’ve always thought she was great.

“The Fusion lads that set it up – it was a writing camp from this time last year. The song had been collecting dust in that file and it wasn’t until she said ‘I’d love to go back to this song and put some work into it’ a couple of months ago that we went back into the studio and freshened up the vocals and got it mastered.

“We sat back and listened to it and thought that this is a great track. It was really organic how it came about. It only took about four or five hours to write the whole thing. We all went in knowing exactly what we wanted. We were of the same mentality, feeling frustrated with everything happening and we were going to take advantage of the opportunity.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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