Last week, Hawke’s Bay-bred rapper 9lives was named in Rolling Stone AU/NZ’s Future of Music, a celebration of the most exciting and innovative artists from Australia and New Zealand.
Known for pioneering the Sigilkore sound, a mix of trap, hyperpop, cloud rap, and electronic music, he has caught the attention of US stars like Trippie Redd and Odetari.
While the current ‘Big 3’ of rap bitterly bicker about their talent in a very public way, 9lives and the new generation of producers quietly go about their business, dropping endless streaming behemoths. 9lives — otherwise known as Max Jardine — already boasts over six million monthly listeners on Spotify, with that impressive figure growing by the week.
Dubbed the “the Metro Boomin of the underground”, 9lives has tapped into a truly modern sound with Sigilkore: a stirring, messy-in-a-good-way, boundless genre-agnostic style.
“In high school, I was like, ‘There’s no way I’m gonna make it out of Hawkes Bay,’” Jardine once pondered, but talent like his will always find a way to be heard.
Keeping up the momentum, 9lives just dropped a new single, “CANADA”, teaming up again with experimental dance artist jnhygs. The energetic track follows their first collaboration “XTAYALIVE” which went viral aross TikTok and gaming edits on social media, all made through internet connections. 9Lives continues to stress the importance of collaboration.
“CANADA” represents my generation of teen artists connecting through the power of the internet,” says 9lives.
“In early 2023 jnhygs found my music and we started chatting through TikTok, releasing our first song together called “XTAYALIVE”. We’ve been friends since this song had a viral moment, and fans have been heavily requesting for us to work together again all over our videos. I sent a bunch of new ideas to jnhygs via Discord and she sent back vocals to “CANADA”, which I then used to create melodic layers and extra percussion to complete the song”.
9Lives “CANADA (w/ jnhygs)” is out now via PULSE Records / Concord Label Group.
