Briggs Sheplife

In “Let It Be Known,” the opening track on the second album from proud Yorta Yorta man Adam Briggs, we learn how close the rapper came to quitting music following the release of 2010’s The Blacklist. “I didn’t tell anyone I’d quit,” he admits, “but on the inside I had.” Disillusioned by the racist comments of so-called fans, he struggled to reconcile why he made music and for whom, eventually deciding that the only way he could continue was if he did it for himself. It’s perhaps not surprising, then, that Sheplife is a deeply personal outing, far more so than its predecessors, The Blacklist and 2009’s Homemade Bombs EP. Named after the rural Australian town of Shepparton in which Briggs was raised, the title track artfully captures Briggs’ knack for injecting humor into what is an otherwise bleak portrait of the area: “Put your house on the market, it’s staying for sale/That’s not a house, that’s just a tent with some nails/Rocking oven mitts, all your stuff is hot to touch/Even the back of the truck was off the back of the truck.” While the album features collaborations with ILL BILL (“Eye for an Eye”), Joyride (“Mike Tyson Love Thing”), Hau (“Get Up”), and Sietta (“Bigger Picture”), the most unlikely collaborator is Dr. G Yunupingu, the acclaimed First Nations artist who passed away in 2017. His magical vocals and fluid guitar work inject a haunting hook into “The Hunt,” a song inspired by Dr. Yunupingu’s totem, Baru, the saltwater crocodile. The lines “We survived a death roll, death toll’s something special” liken the crocodile’s killing action to colonialism and the slaughter it wrought on First Nations communities. Elsewhere, Briggs addresses the displacement of First Nations people from their land (“Always was, always will be,” he booms on the foreboding “Purgatory (Let It Go)”); Indigenous children getting left behind in society (“What if before you even had a dream you were crushed?” he raps on the gritty “Bad Apples”); the phone calls that deliver bad news (“Late Night Calls,” inspired by a cousin who was killed in a fight); and the birth of his daughter (“Bigger Picture”). With the album traversing myriad musical moods, from the soulful “Get Up” and vintage stomp of “Rather Be Dead” to the ominous title track and foreboding bass of “My People,” Sheplife remains a landmark release not only for Briggs, but for Australian hip-hop.