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.”