This past Sunday, under the last of Griffith Park’s September light, Mallrat stood before us, kitty headphones and all. Sunlight, it should be said, takes roughly 8 minutes to reach earth, meaning that every ray that has ever hit your face was already out of date, a warm and diminutive dispatch from the past arriving dressed as the present. Grace Shaw’s (who we know to be Mallrat) 2025 album, Light hit my face like a straight right, is twelve songs of magical realism set in Suburban Australia, where Shaw translates light as divine intervention.

In support of the record, and fresh off an arena run opening of Kylie Minogue in Australia earlier this year, the Brisbane-born artist opened for Tove Lo’s ESTRUS tour at the Greek Theatre and will be accompanying her for select shows. Her autotuned vocals bent into something misty and otherworldly, opening her performance with “My Darling, My Angel” before drifting into “Pavement” and “The Light Streams in And Hits My Face / Hocus Pocus.” In her digitalized timbre, Shaw also led the audience into a cover of Lana Del Rey’s Radio, reinventing the iconic hit in her own language of dreamlike purity. 

After guiding the audience through her electronic bubblegum kingdom, Mallrat closed her set with “Hideaway,” a fitting title for the moment that Griffith Park became tucked away from the sun. Soon, she will be off to Mexico City for the final show of the tour’s North American leg, where one can say with absolute certainty that another crowd will slip through one of her “strange little portals” into a parallel Southeast Queensland, where a clothesline is something you climb towards heaven and the light, as always, arrives 8 minutes late.

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