WATCH: Teenage Maltese Artist Raps About Losing His Parents And Questioning His Beliefs
Young Lydon Borg Bonaci, who goes by the stage name Eddie Fresco, has steadily been making waves this year thanks to his singles and his hip hop trio 215 Collective. Now, he’s back with a brand new single, and it’s as brutally honest as they get.
“Deal With The Devil is a track where I open up about my past,” Eddie Fresco said in a Facebook post announcing the new single. “Losing my parents, fighting my demons, questioning my beliefs and more.” Both Lydon’s parents died when he was 13 year old, within just six weeks of each other.
The music video to the track, which is much darker than previous 215 Collective songs, sees Eddie Fresco rapping in the corridors of an abandoned building. Before the beat even kicks in and all throughout the song, clips from Lydon’s childhood flash on the screen in the form of home videos everyone growing up in the 90s will remember.
“This track is dedicated to my parents, Mark and Mariella Borg Bonaci,” Lydon told Lovin Malta. “It’s all about my life and it’s as honest as I’ll ever be. There was a point in my life which is so dark, that I started doubting everything… even religion. I make reference to this in my song, along with my mum. This is the first time that I’m speaking about it.”
The darker elements of the track come in when Eddie Fresco mentions the only form of escapism he felt he had at that point in time. “The things I had spent my whole life trying to run away from, like violence and theft, suddenly made more sense,” Lydon told Lovin Malta.
“In the track, I also speak about talking to my mother, and asking her to have conversations with God regarding my state at the point in my life where it felt like there was nothing else to fall back on.”
The music video, which was produced by Fabrizio Fenech, required a whole team (Mavric Said, Calrston Saliba and Yanika Muscat) to bring to life.
With 19 tracks released in their first 12 months, Eddie Fresco and 215 Collective have had have not released a mixtape or album yet, but are planning to do so very soon.
“We’ll also be sending our tracks to large international platforms like WorldStarHipHop, and we’re doing it all for Malta’s culture,” Eddie concluded.
Two months ago, a track by fellow 215 rapper Caro went viral when it was featured on Young Verse, a Facebookpage with over 1,000,000 likes.
And if this latest track and the hype it received before it was even received is anything to go by, Eddie Fresco and 215 Collective are definitely going places.
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