Watch Rae Mulla’s Grisly New Video for ‘Maggi’

Inside of Rae Mulla’s head, there are thoughts about parties, his peers and his own psychological issues. The Mumbai rapper lays it all out with a quickfire flow on “Maggi,” the first single from his solo album lol.

Both, the song and the album (releasing on November 26th) are produced by his bandmates Nihal Shetty and Harithelion in SIXK, the alternative hip-hop group in which Mulla is often a sharp, provocative voice. He carries that forward on “Maggi,” whose main hook talks about mixing some Xanax in your instant noodles, followed by verses that reference everything from relationships to Magnetic Fields Festival to being a “mechanical anarchist.”

Mulla says, “I wrote some rough verses for ‘Maggi’ around the end of 2019. Once I finished ‘Maggi,’ I knew my album would be about purity and the perversion of it.” The rapper taps into a deep and mostly dark mind-space with the song but deflects us from reading too much into it. “Everyone has their own issues. I know mine aren’t real, they’re in my head. With this album, I really leaned into the filth to find some sort of resolution; and I let all the issues in my head seem real for a bit. It was bad. But again, I know I’m a privileged person and they’re very fake problems,” he says.

The rapper is in self-destruct mode in the self-directed music video shot by Dhruv Lapsia and edited by Jahaan Noble. There are visual motifs of hazmat suits (signifying hazards, no doubt), plastic toy baby-dolls colored a stark black and a final gruesome shot showing Mulla with a razor to his neck. The rapper says the video was in the works for about two months; with the creative process driven by trips to Goa, watching movies and how he “stole everything from directors I admire, as any secure artist should.”

Lol was christened by Mulla as his album title back in 2017, when he says he wasn’t sure what it would even end up being about. He now describes it with ideas of id and primal instincts, finding out that a “pure world is as disturbing as an impure one.” Up next, Mulla says there are more singles in 2022 and a second album called Smut in the works. He adds, “I’m going to scream at some gigs, hurt myself. Maybe do some singing lessons, direct more videos.”

Watch the video for “Maggi” below.