Mallrat: Butterfly Blue review – a confident, compelling and dreamy debut

Grace Shaw’s best lyrics are delivered with a shrug. When she released her first EP as Mallrat at age 17 (2016’s Uninvited), she immediately joined the pantheon of musicians cataloguing the existential malaise of the suburbs.

But unlike her forebears – Lorde, say, or Arcade Fire, who elevated mundanity into grand narratives of nostalgia and loss – Shaw always maintained a healthy distance.

“Get me off the list,” the Brisbane-born, Melbourne-based artist repeats ad nauseam on the EP’s title track, an early hit. You can hear the eye-roll in her disaffected speak-sung vocals as she drifts through yet another high school party, casting judgment from the fringes.

Not that she’s immune to sentiment entirely. As her popularity swelled, so did the size of her choruses, revealing a coy vulnerability beneath the veneer of detachment. Her next two EPs spawned unusual successes; Groceries, a declaration to a lover invoking the produce aisle as a proxy for intimacy, landed in the top 10 of that year’s Triple J Hottest 100 – a feathery, tongue-in-cheek pop track that sounded like little else in the countdown.

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A follow-up single, the piano ballad Charlie, went even bigger, appearing on both James Corden’s late-night show and The Sims 4 (in the game’s classic garble, no less). Hearing the song stripped of context and chanted at full volume by live crowds feels incongruous with its content – about family dysfunction and domestic dreams – but it’s also testament to Mallrat’s unique sleight of hand: a disarming charm which paints all things, even pain and heartbreak, as merely facts of life.

Butterfly Blue, her long-awaited, frequently brilliant debut album, arrives three years after her last EP. In that time, she moved to LA and back again, her plans scuppered by lockdown. It’s tempting to reach for the album’s easy metaphor: Mallrat returning home from international acclaim, reborn from a chrysalis, now more confident and fully formed as one of Australia’s most compelling, idiosyncratic popstars.

Thematically, though, the album reads less like a complete metamorphosis than a quiet progression of Shaw’s persona. It’s clear she’s moved on from teenage disdain, across the 11 tracks that circle the contours of love in all its forms – unrequited, all-consuming, fleeting. . But the shrugging nonchalance is still there, as she dispenses cutting home truths as offhand remarks.

“I’m being such a freak, I’m sorry,” she apologises on the love song Heart Guitar. Later, on Obsessed, the sentiment repeats: “I must be looking like such a creep.”

Mundanity – and its coexistence with the sublime – remains a core fixation. Heart Guitar begins with Mallrat listing the trivial observations underscoring a great love: “I hear your footsteps / Know how your keys sound when you’re getting close.” Meanwhile, on To You, she makes a simple plea sound transcendent. “Holding on to you,” it goes, her voice melting into a rare, gauzy falsetto, “is all I want to do.”

Her plain admissions allow her leeway to venture into territory that would sound jarring in the hands of a more tortured performer. The buzzy single Surprise Me is a standout: a canny collaboration with rap’s enfant terrible Azealia Banks, whose provocations – everything from a Louis CK namecheck to the comparison “tighter than Nicole Kidman face” – mesh unexpectedly well with Mallrat’s more restrained verses.

There’s also a new throughline to her work: a fuzzy, blown-out guitar that pulls from dream pop and pop-punk to colour tales of giddy crushes and shattering break-ups with the Vaseline-lensed blur of recollection.

At its best, Butterfly Blue evokes a melange of memories dissolving into one another, like the futile attempt, upon waking, to cling on to a dream that is rapidly slipping away, no matter how vivid and sweet it once seemed. A stream of turbulent images – standing on the roof, breaking into cars – runs through I’m Not My Body, It’s Mine, the album’s emotional crux, culminating in a cathartic outro filled with discordant guitar licks and distorted vocalisations. It’s as if the clear-eyed honesty of Charlie has been put through a tumble dryer, spitting out an impressionistic self-portrait of debauchery and wild, galvanising freedom.

Elsewhere, the haziness is less successful. Arm’s Length, a stripped-back dedication to a crush who won’t commit, is too thinly sketched to be much more than filler. The title track, too, sacrifices Mallrat’s trump card – her lyrical specificity, wrenching unexpected emotion from the minutiae of life – for a frustratingly vague refrain: “I’m butterfly, butterfly, butterfly blue,” she coos, lullaby-like, assigning misplaced gravitas to a series of nonsensical words. Instead of artful abstraction, it plays like a series of narcotised 4AM thoughts.

It’s a shame that this track and Arm’s Length are placed in succession at the back end of the record, bleeding into one samey mass and closing the album on a strangely banal note. Still, they are anomalous misfires on a body of work that otherwise cements Mallrat as a true genre generalist who could be poised on the precipice of world domination, at least according to the lead single Rockstar. Not if, but “when I’ve won all the Grammys,” she fantasises: a brief, welcome display of braggadocio. We’re inclined to believe her.

• Butterfly Blue by Mallrat is out now through Dew Process