Music Spotlight | BRIGGS.

Some artists make music. Briggs makes history. And he's been doing it so consistently, so fearlessly, for so long, that it's easy to forget just how much ground this bloke has covered.

Adam Briggs — born and raised in Shepparton, Victoria — is a proud Yorta Yorta man, and he wears that identity literally: the name of his people is tattooed on both forearms. "So every time I rock the mic," he's said, "people know that I am representing." That says everything about where he's coming from and why he's never once compromised it.

His story starts in regional Victoria, a kid who had no real interest in school but an obsession with sound — initially drawn in by Guns N' Roses before the pull of hip hop took over completely. He moved to Melbourne, started hustling, and dropped his breakout EP Homemade Bombs in 2009, which caught the eye of the Hilltop Hoods, who signed him to their Golden Era label and released his debut album The Blacklist in 2010.

From there, the career just kept expanding in every direction at once.

On stage he's opened for 50 Cent, Ice Cube, Ice-T and KRS-One, and shared bills with Midnight Oil, Paul Kelly and Henry Rollins. In 2016, he co-founded hip-hop duo A.B. Original with producer Trials, and what followed was one of the most important Australian albums of the decade. Reclaim Australia won the 2017 ARIAs for Best Independent Release and Best Urban Album, Triple J's J Award for Album of the Year, and A.B. Original were later named APRA Songwriters of the Year. They also became the first Indigenous artists to win the Australian Music Prize — beating out Nick Cave and others. Not bad for a debut record.

The standout single January 26 — featuring Dan Sultan — was an unflinching, unambiguous statement about what that date actually means to First Nations Australians, and it resonated far beyond music circles. Briggs himself described it as capturing "the annual frustration many Indigenous Australians feel from the farce of that holiday." People felt it, because it was real.

But Briggs was never just a rapper. He wrote and performed across all three seasons of ABC's Black Comedy, played the role of Maliyan in the acclaimed drama series Cleverman, and was a regular on The Weekly with Charlie Pickering. Then he went to LA and joined the writers' room for Matt Groening's Netflix animated series Disenchantment. That's The Simpsons guy, for context.

And through it all, he's been building something bigger than himself. In 2015, Briggs founded Bad Apples Music — Australia's first Indigenous-owned and operated hip-hop record label — created specifically to nurture and platform First Nations artists, giving a home to artists like Birdz, Nooky, Tasman Keith and others who might otherwise have had to navigate an industry that wasn't built for them.

"Talent will get you so far, hard work will get you the rest of the way — but sacrifice is what separates the people who make it and keep making it from those that don't," Briggs once said. You hear that in everything he does.

In 2023, Double J named him Australian Artist of the Year, honouring his multifaceted career as a rapper, writer, and mentor. Fifty Cent, Ice Cube and a Netflix writing credit in one career. Shepparton to everywhere.

That's Briggs.