hendle. Why now?

When I was fifteen, Australian hip-hop felt like a world being built in real time.

This was long before I understood scenes as industries, before I thought about distribution agreements, touring circuits, radio programmers or the slow professional machinery that turns music into a career. I knew there were records, shows, crews, arguments and voices that sounded like they came from somewhere I recognised. The accents were ours. The humour was ours. The suburban ugliness was ours. It did not arrive already validated from somewhere overseas.

I loved early Hilltop Hoods with the absolute conviction that only a fifteen-year-old can bring to music. I listened without distance or qualification. I did not yet have the critical language to explain production, cadence or the cultural tension surrounding Australian hip-hop. I just knew the music made the place around me feel more vivid.

trials was already part of that world.

Through the Funkoars, his production work and the wider Adelaide scene, he became one of those names embedded in the architecture of Australian hip-hop. Later came A.B. Original with Briggs, a project that did not merely participate in the culture but altered its political temperature. Across decades, trials accumulated the kind of credits that make the phrase “debut album” sound almost administratively incorrect.

Fifteen-year-old me would have been absolutely psyched to know that one day I would sit across from trials and interview him. He would have been even more overwhelmed by the idea that there might eventually be a trials solo album to discuss.

That album is hendle.

And the question I have been unable to escape is: why now?

More precisely: why not fifteen or twenty years ago?

trials has spent more than two decades writing, producing, performing and helping other artists locate the strongest version of themselves. He is a foundational member of the Funkoars, one half of A.B. Original, a songwriter, instrumentalist and producer whose fingerprints appear throughout Australian music. hendle is entirely written, produced, performed, recorded and mixed by him. It is ten tracks long and runs for less than half an hour. On paper, none of this suggests an artist tentatively introducing himself.

And yet hendle carries the rawness we tend to go searching for in first albums.

Not first solo albums. First albums.

The kind made before an artist understands what should be concealed. Before craft becomes armour. Before experience teaches someone how to turn pain into a tasteful metaphor, place it at a flattering distance and call the result vulnerability.

That is the strange achievement of hendle. It is made by someone who knows exactly what he is doing, but it does not sound protected by that knowledge.

Trying to catch up

I interviewed trials for the STAUNCH. podcast (the episode will be available soon). 

Most of the time, when I interview an artist, my genuine interest in how they work eventually opens a door. I ask about a choice they made, they begin explaining it, and somewhere inside that explanation they find a more complicated answer than the one they initially intended to give. The conversation slows. The rehearsed account falls away. We begin talking about the thing underneath the thing.

With trials, the answers came almost too easily.

He was hyper, quick, funny and several steps ahead of me. His brain seemed to finish the question before I had. I would open what I thought was a pathway and he would race to the end of it, give me the answer, decorate it with an anecdote and move on before I had properly entered.

It took me nearly an hour to become comfortable with his flow.

At first, I mistook the speed for resistance. I wondered whether I was failing to find the right question, or whether he was simply too practised at being interviewed to be surprised by one. Eventually, I understood that speed is part of how trials moves through the world. His mind appears to make connections at production tempo: selecting, cutting, arranging and resolving information before the rest of us have finished hearing the sample.

But there may also be a form of protection inside that velocity.

When you can answer quickly, you do not always have to remain inside the question.

Hendle remains inside the question.

The album slows trials down enough for the listener to hear what his energy might otherwise move past. It is a record concerned with his childhood, domestic violence, displacement, racism, mental health, substance use, sobriety, family and the long work of becoming a man who does not reproduce what was done around him. It revisits the first sixteen years of Daniel Rankine’s life, but it does so from the position of a husband, father and artist who has survived long enough to understand that survival is not the end of the story.

The record is not raw because trials lacks the ability to refine it. It is raw because refinement has been used to expose rather than disguise.

That distinction matters.

He knows how to make a beat land. He knows how to sequence a record, how to build momentum, when to introduce a hook and how to extract a performance from a vocalist. He has spent a career bringing out the best in other artists. On hendle, he turns that producer’s attention towards himself.

It is an uncomfortable choice. Perhaps a necessary one.

The producer usually gets to remain just outside the frame. Even when his contribution is essential, he can redirect attention towards the artist standing at the microphone. A.B. Original is a genuine partnership, but Briggs is often understood publicly as its principal frontman. The Funkoars provided the anonymity and amplification of a crew. Production offers its own kind of shelter: the ability to speak through sound without always becoming the explicit subject of it.

There is nowhere to hide on hendle.

Even the title refuses the safety of a stage name. Hendle takes its name from trials’ great-grandfather, bringing the record into family history before its first sound plays. The album is not called trials. It is not a clean declaration of solo identity. It reaches backwards, into lineage and inheritance, as if becoming more completely himself required locating the people whose lives made his possible.

The debut paradox

Debut records are often compelling because the artist has spent their whole life waiting to make one.

Years of material, identity, resentment and ambition are compressed into a single opening statement. The artist does not yet know whether another album will be permitted, so everything arrives at once. Even imperfect debuts can possess an urgency that more accomplished records lose. The songs have not yet learnt patience. They are trying to prove both that the artist exists and that their existence matters.

trials has nothing left to prove in that elementary sense.

His bona fides are almost comically secure. He is Australian hip-hop through and through. Hilltop Hoods. Funkoars. A.B. Original. Decades of production and touring. Awards, credits and cultural impact. He does not require a solo album to establish that he belongs here.

So how has he made a debut with debut stakes?

Perhaps because hendle is not introducing trials the musician. It is introducing Daniel Rankine as the subject of his own work.

Those are not the same person.

The record’s technical confidence belongs to trials. Its uncertainty belongs to Daniel. The first has been operating publicly for decades. The second is only now allowing himself to be fully seen.

This is where the question “why now?” begins to answer itself.

Fifteen years ago, trials may have possessed the musical ability to make this album, but he could not have made this particular record. Not because the events had not happened. They had. Not because he lacked language. He had built a career from language and sound. But testimony requires more than memory. It requires a position from which the memory can be safely approached.

Hendle is inseparable from the life that followed the trauma it describes: fatherhood, marriage, sobriety, cultural reconnection and the gradual recognition of patterns that must end with him.

An artist can tell you what happened while still trapped inside what happened. That can create powerful work. But hendle is interested in a more difficult task. It asks what the past means once a person has built enough of a future to look back at it without being entirely swallowed.

Why now?

Because now he has children.

Because now he has been sober for five years.

Because now he can honour his mother’s survival without turning her suffering into spectacle.

Because now he can describe the violence surrounding his childhood while also asking what responsibility belongs to the adult men listening.

Because now the man who spent years producing other people can recognise that his own story deserves production, arrangement, space and an audience.

The album may carry the nakedness of a debut, but it could only have been made by a middle-aged artist. Its rawness is not youthful recklessness. It is excavation undertaken with adult consequences.

An evening of self-indulgence

At the City Recital Hall, trials calls the album launch “an evening of self-indulgence”.

The line gets a laugh. It also gives him somewhere to retreat.

The Ground Floor Bar is an unusual place for this kind of hip-hop performance. The foyer has the clean, slightly formal feeling of an institution designed for recitals, conversations and donors holding wine glasses. Screens display trials’ visual art. Headphones carry passages from a forthcoming autobiography. Onstage there is an MPC—the machine he speaks about with genuine affection for helping him make music—and a beautiful Fender bass, its wood grain stained a deep cherry and its body covered in cute stickers.

He wears a bucket hat.

I find myself thinking the room is both perfect and imperfect for what he is doing.

Perfect because this is not a conventional album launch. It is a retrospective, exhibition, monologue, recovery meeting, hip-hop performance and public act of testimony. The institutional setting gives the evening permission to sprawl across forms.

Imperfect because I want to know what this material would feel like in a hip-hop-native venue such as the Gladdy. I want the low ceiling, the crowded room and the physical pressure of people standing close together. I want to know whether the formality surrounding the performance protects it or contains it.

I also want to hear the record with a band.

The live show makes the strength of trials’ production obvious, but it also reveals how much movement remains latent inside the music. Bass, keys and live drums could give the songs another body without sacrificing the intimacy of the words. The current one-man staging makes sense as a first unveiling: Daniel standing beside the machine that helped him survive, carrying the work alone because its aloneness is part of the point. But the songs are sturdy enough to grow beyond this initial frame.

From the beginning, the audience is with him.

He invites the crowd to enjoy themselves, although enjoyment is an unstable proposition in a performance built around grief, violence and recovery. He opens by telling us, “I’m doing well right now and I’m a fucking idiot.” The sentence contains the central tension of both the show and the album. He is not presenting himself as healed, enlightened or cleanly transformed. He is doing well. He is also capable of stupidity. Sobriety has not made him a saint. Insight has not resolved every contradiction.

This matters because narratives of recovery are often made unbearable by their tidiness. The person suffers, reaches a crisis, changes and emerges as a spokesperson for change. trials offers no such clean conversion. He remains restless, funny, shy and visibly uncertain about what it means to place this much of himself before a room.

He asks the audience to “make some noise” for loved ones who should be there that evening. The crowd chants with him during the second song. Depending on where I am standing inside the noise, I hear either “you’ve just got to show love” or “you’ve just got to show up”.

The ambiguity feels appropriate.

Love, in hendle, is not primarily an emotion. It is a behaviour. It is showing up. It is interrupting violence. It is becoming sober. It is thanking your wife, the mother of your children, from the stage. It is refusing to pass inherited damage forward.

There are only a couple of moments where the audience can properly dance. They move, but without enormous conviction. They are not really here to dance. They are here for the words.

Lyrically, trials is strongest when he slows down. His fast mind and technical instincts can crowd a line with momentum, but when he allows space around the language, the songs become poetry. The audience needs that space because these are not bars designed simply to display virtuosity. They are carrying testimony. We need to hear what is being said.

The room contains industry supporters, long-term fans, family and community. Some hold drinks while cheering for a man speaking about five years of sobriety. The contradiction is visible but not necessarily hypocritical. They are not required to reproduce his journey in order to witness it. They are there because they have already been travelling with him for years.

trials does not need to search for day-one supporters. He has had them for twenty years.

They arrive early to look at the digital exhibition. They carry copies of the album on vinyl out of the venue. They hang on his stories and fill the difficult pauses with warmth. When he falters, the audience does not become embarrassed on his behalf. They remain.

This is not the tentative support offered to an unknown artist with a promising first release. It is the accumulated loyalty of people who have spent decades waiting for trials to step into the centre of his own work.

What the industry does with a record like this

Is this a commercial show?

Not really.

At least, not in the conventional sense.

It is difficult to imagine the Australian music industry knowing exactly what to do with hendle. The record has the recognisable form of a hip-hop album, but its true function is less straightforward. It is too intimate to be reduced to heritage Australian hip-hop, too formally accomplished to be treated as therapeutic self-expression and too invested in social message to disappear easily into lifestyle playlisting.

There are songs with hooks, grooves and sharp production choices. trials knows how to make music people can move to. But the album is not built around the uncomplicated pleasures that typically make a solo project easy to market. Its appeal depends upon a listener being willing to sit with somebody else’s memories and then examine their own behaviour.

Even the live performance resists the normal promise of an album launch. It is not simply a celebration of a new product. It is the public staging of the process that made the product necessary.

That does not make the album commercially impossible. trials’ existing audience is substantial, loyal and intergenerational. He has the support and profile required to grow the project. The audience is likely to become larger as the record finds those who recognise themselves inside it.

But commercial logic is not the best measure of what has happened here.

Artistically, it is already there.

There is heart in the record. There is life in it. There is a community that loves it. Those things are often discussed as consolation prizes when a work is not engineered for scale, as though sincerity and collective meaning are what artists receive in lieu of success. Hendle suggests another possibility: that community is not the fallback market for the work but the reason the work exists.

trials has described the album as being for people. That phrasing risks sounding broad enough to mean nothing, but the performance makes it specific. The record is for children who noticed the big mistakes adults assumed they could conceal. It is for single mothers who held families together inside violence. It is for men trying to become something other than what they witnessed. It is for people in recovery. It is for those who have survived long enough to realise survival has left them with obligations.

Near the end of the show, trials delivers a monologue condemning violence against women. The support service 1800RESPECT has a presence in the room, with a table and banner. There is a call to action. The final song carries the blunt hook: “Any man that hits a woman is a bitch.”

Could this feel heavy-handed at a music show?

Yes.

Does it feel right in this room?

Also yes.

The message is earned because it has not been imported into the performance as corporate responsibility or topical branding. It emerges directly from the life the album has described. trials has spent the evening showing the audience what violence does to a child, how it mutates across time and how much work is required to stop it becoming inheritance.

The bluntness is part of the point. These songs are heaving with message because subtlety is not always morally superior. There are subjects that Australian culture has discussed delicately for decades while women continue to be killed. Maybe what society needs is not another elegant description of the problem. Maybe it needs a room of men and women shouting a sentence that leaves no interpretive exit.

Do not hide

trials is truly shy.

This feels like a strange observation to make about someone who has spent decades commanding stages. But stagecraft and exposure are not the same thing. A person can learn to control a crowd without learning how to remain visible when the performance stops protecting them.

Throughout the evening, trials undercuts himself. He calls the event self-indulgent. He jokes. He moves quickly. At times he seems almost apologetic for asking the room to look at him this closely.

But all art is self-indulgent by nature. The artist believes an internal experience deserves external form. They believe their arrangement of sound, image or language merits somebody else’s time. Art cannot exist without that initial presumption.

What I witnessed at City Recital Hall was not a man congratulating himself. It was communal sharing by an individual being incredibly raw about his struggles and trauma, inviting a room full of people to travel through them with him.

He should own the self-indulgence.

He should not shy away from the artist he is.

He should cry when the songs make him cry.

He should not hide onstage.

At the end of the set, he does cry. The room holds him there.

This may be the real answer to why hendle arrives now. Not because trials has finally become skilled enough to make a solo record. He was skilled enough years ago. Not because the industry has suddenly granted permission. His career has long since exceeded the point where permission should matter.

It arrives now because Daniel Rankine is finally willing—or at least willing enough—to stay in the room after the quick answer has run out.

For all its craft, hendle is not the sound of an artist demonstrating mastery. It is the sound of mastery being used to remove the defences mastery usually provides.

Fifteen-year-old me would have been ecstatic that trials had made a solo album.

The person I am now is grateful he waited.

Not because the wait was fair, or because the experiences behind the record needed to happen, but because hendle could not have been made simply by the young artist I once imagined releasing it. It required the producer, the rapper, the husband, the father, the sober man, the Ngarrindjeri man reconnecting himself to lineage, and the frightened child who remained present beneath all of those accomplishments.

trials has made his first solo album after twenty years in public.

Somehow, it still sounds like the first time he has spoken.

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Written by Travis De Vries

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