Every artist faces challenges. But getting called upon by one of the biggest bands in the world to deliver a verse in one hour? That’s as high-stakes as it gets.
Luckily, Becca Hatch can deliver. The 24-year-old songstress, whose mum is Samoan and dad Kamilaroi, has been preparing for this moment since she started out in the music industry at age 16. She grew up in Campbelltown in south-western Sydney and is now based in Naarm.
Last year, she dropped her debut EP Mayday, which set her out on the path towards one of the wildest twists in her career. The EP was more dance-oriented than Hatch’s previous releases, with elements of drum and bass (Bass Keeps Calling), Jersey club (Think Of You), house (Settle Down) and amapiano (Leave Me Low) entwining with Hatch’s pop and RnB influences.
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Off the back of Mayday, Hatch won New Talent of the Year at the National Indigenous Music Awards and was nominated for the Michael Gudinski Breakthrough Artist award at the 2024 ARIAs.
After supporting multi-platinum musician Tinashe on her Australian tour and performing at Yours & Owls festival, Hatch was asked to join Coldplay onstage at Sydney’s Accor Stadium, where she added an original verse to the British band’s song WE PRAY.
“That definitely was the craziest thing to ever happen to me,” she says. “The way that it happened was so crazy.”
Hatch was in Sydney on the Friday before Coldplay arrived. She got a call from her manager, who told her Chris Martin was hoping to meet up with a few local artists and play some songs.
“I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, yes, I would love to play some music for Chris Martin,’” Hatch says.
An hour later, the phone rang again. “My manager’s like, ‘I don’t want to freak you out,’” Hatch says. This time, Martin was asking if Hatch could write and record a verse for WE PRAY. “‘But the catch is we only have an hour to get it through and the show is next week,’” she recalls.
She was in a car with her mum at the time, driving to a fitting. “So I’m, like, writing this verse in the car. I was just trying to make anything up. Nothing was coming to me. It was so stressful,” she says.
Once the fitting was over, she filmed a video on her phone of an improvised verse. “It felt so cringe,” Hatch says. “I was singing to the camera and just, like, fingers crossed.”
After what could have only been an anxious weekend, Hatch got a call on Monday morning to say that Coldplay liked the verse and wanted her to join them in front of 80,000 people at Accor Stadium two nights later. “I was just bawling my eyes out. I just couldn’t believe it,” she says.
Since then, Hatch has carried that energy into 2025 and has been busy working on new music, some of which will see the light of day in early 2026. Soon, she’ll be taking the stage at Strawberry Fields, backed by DJ Nicole Tania.
“I’m going to play a bit more of a dance set and less of the RnB, poppy songs that I have,” Hatch tells Beat. “I love festivals like this because I can really play the dance music that I like to listen to and the ones that I feel like I’m a bit more creative on.”
With her latest work, she’s been drawn back to the RnB sound of her early releases, but she isn’t saying goodbye to dance music. “For me, it would be good to carve out a space that sits between dance and RnB and alternative,” she says.
She also excels at emotive ballads, as demonstrated by the Mayday centrepiece Crash, a song about “being in the midst of what feels like a really hard time.” A couple of months after releasing it, Hatch put out an acoustic version of the song with lyrics in Samoan. Her mum and uncle handled the translation.
“I showed it to my mum and I was like, ‘Maybe I should make a Samoan version?’ She was like, ‘Oh my gosh! Yeah! I’d love to help you.’”
The experience allowed Becca Hatch to forge a deeper attachment to her Samoan roots.
“My mum is from an island called Savai’i and her village is called Salelologa. She was born and raised there, [then] came here. So it was a really good way to connect with my culture and with my mum,” she says.
Becca Hatch is playing at Strawberry Fields, find out more here.
