“I’m too old for my skin,” 17 year-old singer/songwriter Mel Bester, known better to the country as E^ST, sung on her debut track Old Age. In many ways that’s an apt description of E^ST as an artist. She’s shy but quietly self-assured, independent and gifted with a mind more inquisitive than the average teenager.

There was an honesty to E^ST’s debut that was striking for her age. It immediately grabbed her airplay on triple j and set her up for a second EP as one the most anticipated new artists in the country. Second time around, she’s retained that raw honesty that permeated Old Age but updated her sonic palette, colouring the four-track set with expansive electronics and hip-hop influenced beats.

Speaking to Bester on the eve of a national headline tour, she appears to have figured out her own individuality like most teens nearing their twenties but she’s also got an acute mind far beyond her years - one that’s able to conceptualise thoughts quickly and maturely both in a musical and a verbal sense.

Even her career is firing beyond her years right now. Her sophomore EP The Alley has already picked up deserved praise and its title track The Alley has all but surpassed Old Age as a triple j favourite. But, despite this, she’s managed to keep a level-headedness to the way she approaches this kind of attention - the first sign during our chat of a maturity more than her 18 years.

“I go through most of the comments and I reply to most of them,” she says of scouring social media.”

“But I don’t let myself get affected too much by it even with the nice comments because if you let those affect you then the bad ones will as well.”

It’s not that Bester doesn’t care what people think. She evidently does. But she’s smart enough to realise that comments aren’t the only measure of her own work.

“I do care whether people like it or not, I can’t help but care,” she later tells me when talking about whether she was nervous releasing the second EP almost a year and a half after her first.

“Some people have been waiting a long time for new material and now that I’ve finally given it to them I was so scared, I was like what if they hate it?”

The good news is, they don’t hate it. The Alley shot straight into the top twenty of triple j’s airway charts and the other three songs on the EP could easily do the same thing. Each of them are organic, personal cut with a pop sensibility that almost sits her in the same world as fellow youngsters Troye Sivan and even Lorde.

From the stomping ferocity of The Alley to the heartbreaking emotion of Somebody Else, she covers all bases with the lyrics revolving around someone trying to find their identity. “I do like to write a lot about my own feelings and my own experiences because there’s no other outlet for me to express that,” she says. “I’m not a very outgoing, talkative person so most of my ideas and opinions I show through my music.”

All the songs on the EP are written about her own personal experiences apart from Monster which was penned from the perspective of somebody suffering from anxiety. “My mind is a monster, I can’t tame it but I want to,” she sings on the track.

“I don’t suffer from anxiety but a lot of people close to me in my life do,” she explains to me.

The subject matters may be heavy but they’re delivered with an element of pop gloss that make them more accessible. Pop’s been a dirty word in alternative circles for years but now more than ever it seems the stigma surrounding the genre has been lifted as artists and critics alike have come to appreciate its forthright elements. E^ST agrees with this, explaining that she doesn’t listen to much pop but she admires it.

“I do like the way that pop songs work,” she admits. “It’s a melody that’s easy to listen to and a lot of the times it’s very clear about what the lyrics are about. I try to include that in my songs. Some of them I leave to be a little bit cryptic “

That openness to simplicity may be The Alley’s greatest strength, particularly in its dying moments when she sings, “I am gonna try to be somebody else,” over mumbling, orchestral synths. Its an emotional kick in the guts and as horrible as that sounds, it’s a beautiful thing.

Growing up, Bester moved around a lot and was home schooled. The easy assumption would be that a home-schooled, introverted musician must to be a loner but she’s not. She’s clearly shy but she’s got a friendly warmth to her that shines through above any reservedness. When it comes to talking about her schooling the topic turns to academics versus experience in music.

“You don’t really need school to do it,” she says talking about music of which she started writing around “age 12 or 13”.

“It’s not so academic. In the music industry it’s all about the people you meet and what you can learn from them rather than what you can learn from books.”

She just continues to create juxtapositions. She’s shy yet confident enough to perform in front of a crowd, she doesn’t listen to pop but she injects pop in her music and she’s an independent, home-schooled student heavily reliant on other people. She tells me, “You need to evolve and grow and change and you won’t be able to do that if you’re in you own walls and don’t let other people in.”

It’s obvious that she’s not just a musician, she’s a music fan. She pulls her beats from hip-hop, her melodies from pop and is inspired by Imogen Heaps’ lyricism. On top of that she cites metal and theatre as two of her favourite musical genres. Country and dub-step are the only styles she can’t stomach.

Her music taste is ridiculously cool and well-informed but perhaps the coolest things about Bester is that she’s learnt to completely accept what she likes and shed any embarrassment that comes from a teenage peer pressure to follow the status quo.

“It’s weird. When you’re young you listen to things because everyone else is listening to it and you don’t mention the things you have been listening to because it might bring shame on you,” she recounts. “I’m now at a point where you enjoy what you enjoy and you should just listen to whatever you want. If that’s Taylor Swift then cool.”

It’s after this that she finds the confidence to tell me that Barbara Streisand was the first record she listened to from start to finish and that she think she’s amazing. She has no shame, nor should she.

As for what’s next, Bester is happy to take it as it comes. She’s embarking on a headline tour which is set to introduce her to a whole new audience and her Like A Version on triple j this morning is already blowing up the internet. She stripped down The Verve’s Bittersweet Symphony - a song that came in at number four in the triple j Hottest 100 in 1998 which also happens to be the year she was born. It was a electro-tinged, stirring cover that burst into Massive Attack’s Teardrops at the end. “Shat myself when I heard the Teardrop chords,” one YouTuber commented. I think we all did.
 

Despite tackling two massive tracks E^ST insists she’s “not ambitious.”

“I think the most I want is just to be able to make music full time and be able to live off it. And not even live luxuriously.”

Based on her trajectory right now, it sounds like that won’t be difficult to achieve.

Words by the interns' Sam Murphy for Cool Accidents

E^st's second EP The Alley is available now where all good music is sold | streamed.