On the Rise
Mackenzy Mackay

Ask him to account for the places that he’s called home and there are a handful of red pins in the map. Originally born in Yorkshire, the 29-year-old singer/songwriter can reflect on a childhood spent in Scotland, stints in Australia, Norway, London, New Zealand, and now, making a home in the quiet countryside of Cambridge — and while he’s content, he can’t say with certainty that it’s where he intends to settle on a more permanent basis. “I’ve moved around a lot,” he recalls, “And I don’t think I’m going to live where I am forever.”

Mackay’s desire for movement doesn’t seem to capture a sense of restlessness, but rather, a learned tactic for self-preservation. He’s used to taking his circumstances into his own hands, a mindset that, to some extent, is connected to his early experiences of hardship. Mackay and his three siblings were raised by a single mother, and he admits that sometimes, it was hard to make ends meet. Consequently, his compass was defined  by pragmatism. “I had to look after myself from a young age and grow up quickly,” he says. “I’ve been through spouts of not having places to live and not being able to afford much in life, times when I’ve had to search through every jacket in the house and every pocket in my jeans to get 20ps together to get to and from sessions.” He recalls stretches of living off “tomato soup and garlic bread five days a week,” and sleeping wherever there was room — whether it be a friend’s sofa, the floor, or even a rehearsal space in Fulham where he kept his belongings in a corner and helped out around the place in exchange for somewhere to sleep. “I was just darting about here, there, and everywhere,” he says of that period, which would ultimately inform his 2023 EP No Fixed Abode.

As Mackay talks through his experiences, movement seems to be the engine that exists at the core of his story. Not just in a physical sense, but also in the musical references that inspire his own fusion of indie-pop and hip-hop, in which genre appears to exist without borders.  “I’ve always loved rap music, like old school hip hop, like ‘90s hip hop, Bone Thugs-n-Harmony, Big L,” he says. “And I’ve always listened to a bit of punk rock. Louis Armstrong, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Goo Goo Dolls. I’ve always loved a good mixture of stuff, and I think that has really developed the way I work on music.”

Music seemed to always fill the spaces in-between within Mackay’s life but he knew that fundamentally, it dictated his path. Years in London were spent studying music and working full-time at a pub alongside a friend — “attendance was like eight percent or something ridiculous,” he admits with a sheepish chuckle. He made a move to New Zealand and landed weeks ahead of the pandemic, ultimately changing the trajectory of his plans. “Who’d have fucking thought Covid would have hit a month after I got there? It was mad,” he laughs.

At the time, Mackay was working at a logistics company, filling and emptying shipping containers. His routine saw him waking up at at five in the morning, working through the day to be home by two. The rest of his time was spent in a studio room under a friend’s house, where he and his producer flatmate Scott decided that if they were going to be stuck there, they may as well try to write. “I’ve always done music, always messed around with guitar and tried to write bits here and there forever, really,” he says. “But then it was like, all right, while we’re here, let’s just try to do like an idea a day. And we ended up making a shitload of ideas, just buckets of them.” He reflects on the two years that followed fondly, noting, “That was a two-year stint of just hanging out, working on music, lots of camping, fishing, and that was really nice.”

Having released a few songs in New Zealand with the overall intention to create a more complete project, Mackay came back to the UK at the end of 2021, timing his return in line with his mother’s birthday. He turned up unannounced at the Huddersfield pub that she ran with her partner, he tells me. "I didn't tell anyone I was coming home," he says. "I just went there, popped in, and that was a really nice surprise." Within weeks, stabilised by a sense of home that felt reciprocal, he made the decision to give music an honest chance, using savings from his time in New Zealand to buy himself a couple of months to write and post clips of his songs on social media. “That's when I was like, right, I need to have a good pop at this.”

From this point, Mackay’s focus was oriented towards building his career on Instagram, posting freestyles over other people's beats a few times a week. "It was a nice little reaction," he says of that first post. "I was like, oh, that's good, I should do more of them." By March, he'd started dabbling on TikTok, a platform he admits he'd barely touched before, but it was this shift into the unknown that would prove to be his pivot into uncharted success. 

"I wrote this idea one morning, about half an hour on my notepad, and then quickly did it,” Mackay tells me. “It was just a thirty second clip, I put it on TikTok, and then my mum called me. We chatted for half an hour, and then I'd gone back on TikTok, and the video I'd posted had done thousands of likes already," he says. "I was like, ‘Fucking hell, that is mad’. That was the first time I'd ever had anything sort of fly like that, and it just kept going, and the follower thing went from like no followers to ten-thousand in a day. It was sudden, and it was mental.”

From this point, things snowballed. Mackay had amassed 30,000 followers on TikTok by the time he met his manager in early 2022. He self-released an EP with the remaining songs pulled from the New Zealand writing haul and having reached 9,000 followers on Instagram by the end of the year, set a modest goal of hitting 10,000 before January. But after posting “Venus”, an older track written back in New Zealand, things went further than he expected. "I wanted to hit 10,000, but I hit 100,000," he tells me. It was a staggering rise in numbers, but things ultimately plateaued into something that Mackay could take stock of. 

He went on to release his second EP, the six-track Life, Love, and Upsets, in 2024 and his sofa-surfing days finally came to an end, settling into a place of his own by August that same year. Things had taken shape, and since then, he’s had his head down with a focus on seeing a full album to completion.

Adapting to the process of making a full-length work wasn’t all that seamless. Mackay was no longer shooting ideas back and forth with a friend in a quiet studio space, but he found himself getting to grips with a slew of early co-writing sessions which were, by his own account, a shock to the system. "I remember doing two weeks of sessions with different people every day," he says. "By the end of it, I was like, ‘I'm fucked, I got nothing else to give right now’. It was like two weeks of intense speed dating sessions of meeting new people every single day, and there's no off button." However, he eventually settled into it, finding the collaborators who got his sound that he gelled with naturally. "You just find the people that you mesh with a bit more than others," he says. “They get your sound a bit more.”

Feeling comfortable with regards to location made a difference in how the songs would unfold, too. Most of the album took shape in Nashville, a city that became an unlikely creative anchor for Mackay. He tried Los Angeles, but it never really clicked. "I don’t really like LA," he shrugs. "I just felt quite by myself there." After one lonely birthday spent there, he flew to Nashville, and felt a noticeable shift. "I immediately felt different," he says. "It was a lot smaller, and I met some really cool people there, and it was just like, all right, this is sick." 

Since then, the city has called him back repeatedly. On one trip his brother happened to be in town at the same time; on another, extended family drove up from Mississippi with his grandfather for an unannounced reunion. I point out the presence of these surprise connections with family members, and the presence of home that informs Mackay’s musical flow, but he explains them as simple coincidence. He’s spent so much time comfortably on his own that he doesn’t need to rely on others to feel inspired — but it doesn’t hurt. 

With that in mind, Mackay was able to work through the songs with assurance around what worked for him without the need for external opinion, even pulling back on material that had drifted from his instincts and going back to the drawing board where necessary. "It sounded a bit soft, and I wanted it to be heavier and have power behind it, more gritty guitars," he says. "I love that sound with a bit of rapping but keeping that melodic flow to the vocals." It was a real workshop attitude; some songs were retooled, while others were scrapped outright with new ones written in their place.

This has resulted in a collection of songs with a varied, though honest sonic and emotional palette. Mackay touches on different facets of love, speaking to those that he cares for, as well as those who are no longer in his life, teetering from hip-hop to alt-pop. "Originally the concept of the album was like, who, what, where," he explains. "It's like who I am, what I love, and where I'm from. There's the light and the shade. One side of it's like we're gonna be together forever, the other side of it is like nothing lasts forever, you know. It's not all one theme, but they all just sort of fell out naturally."

On his new single, “What It Means To Be Loved”, Mackay offers an introduction to what can be anticipated of his debut. Serving as an ode to the person who changed his perspective on how to love, it provides a glimpse into a new era in which he has accessed a safe space that allows him to 

Mackay could only go about the process of articulating who he truly is by maintaining a solid foundation of self-belief. He identifies this as the most important thing that has informed the making of the album. "You have to stick to your guns," he says. “It can be hard sometimes to really advocate for yourself, and I think it's something that is so important, especially in music. If you feel strongly about something, and someone is telling you a different thing otherwise, but you know what you want, you have to trust yourself and have your own back — but also, at the same time, be open to people's ideas.”

This was a particularly hard-earned lesson for Mackay, shaped by years of nobody quite believing in his music career prior to his ascent. When his ambition was shrugged off, he needed to stand his ground. "No one ever believed me that I could do it," he says. "It's like no one's gonna believe in you until you do it. I don't hate anyone for it, but when people say, 'we always knew you could do it,' I'll call them out. I say, 'I know you fucking didn't.'" There's no bitterness in how he tells it, but it reads explicitly as a driving source of motivation. 

Mackay’s resolve shows up most plainly on stage, where the nerves, he says, have never fully gone away, but he pushes through regardless. Whether it be the sold-out invite-only show at London's Troubadour before he'd even established a consistent audience, headline dates that pulled crowds of over a thousand, or even a US tour run across seventeen cities. "The nervous feeling before going on stage, it's never disappeared," he reveals. “But then when you get out there and do that first song, it's like you've just landed exactly where you're meant to be, and you're just having fun with it.”

There have been quieter stretches to pan out the excitement, though, and Mackay would become aware of this natural ebb and flow. An eight-month gap without new music left him, by his own admission, in his head about slipping engagement. "Seeing the numbers dropping, it's hard to not let it get in your head," he says. But the tide has turned, and the metrics have become more forgiving — a reminder that people are still attuned to what he has to say. "We're on the rise again," he says. “Things have started going back up again now. I’ve been a lot more active these last few months on socials, and actually released some music.”

Towards the end of our conversation, I ask Mackay what he'd say to the version of himself who was still dreaming this life into existence, sleeping on borrowed couches and scraping together coins for studio sessions. His answer is short, light, and brightened with a smile that he’s worn consistently: "Just keep cracking on. Just keep it going." It's the same instruction he's been giving himself since New Zealand, the Troubadour, and even the eight-month quiet patch — and it's carried him, more or less in a straight line, from a studio under a house to preparing to release an album that shows the world who he truly is. 

And now, that restless itch is back. There’s more in store for Mackay, and while he maintains a composed demeanour, there’s an infectious giddiness that comes with the idea of all of the possibilities laid out before him. He’s looking forward to touring, getting the album out, people hearing the new music, and simply being able to ramp things up again. “I can’t wait to get the fucking throttle going,” he mused, “Let's fucking go and let's go full speed. Throw everything you've got at the wall. You know, just go for it."