Australian rapper YNG Martyr releases the new single, ‘SINCE YOU BEEN GONE’, offering a stark, confrontational take on early-2000s pop culture filtered through modern underground rap. Moving beyond irony or novelty, Martyr strips the original song down, reconstructing it as something colder, heavier, and deliberately antagonistic.
Following his previous reinterpretation of ‘MILKSHAKE,’ Martyr continues his streak of transforming songs deeply embedded in millennial memory, not as throwbacks, but as raw material for something entirely new. On ‘SINCE YOU BEEN GONE,’ the familiar melodic core of Kelly Clarkson’s hit is submerged beneath dense trap percussion and aggressive sub bass and angsty, intense rap delivery from Martyr.
Speaking about the track, YNG Martyr explained: “‘Since You Been Gone’ started in LA last year with my producer Reyko. We were messing around in the studio and took Kelly Clarkson’s Since U Been Gone and flipped it into something completely different. It’s heavy, metallic, bass-loaded, full crowd-energy rage. It’s made for jumping, moshing, gym sessions, all of it. The song’s pretty simple at its core. It’s about cutting a toxic person out of your life and finally killing it again: since you’ve been gone, I’m winning again. Feeling sharper, more locked in, more myself. It’s ego-driven, a little vindictive, but mostly just that feeling of realising you’re way better off after cutting something that was holding you back. I honestly didn’t even think it was going to come out. I posted a snippet in my Discord like ‘this will probably never drop,’ and everyone lost their mind and told me I had to release it. They were right.”
Hailing from Townsville, Queensland, Martyr grew up far from any established rap infrastructure. Recognising that local validation wasn’t his path, he built an international audience across the US and Europe before gaining attention at home. That distance from scene-driven expectations has shaped his genre-fluid, internet-native approach, unbound by traditional categorisation.
‘SINCE YOU BEEN GONE’ occupies a unique space at the intersection of underground rap and pop deconstruction. Drawing from experimental trap textures while maintaining a lyrical focus rooted in introspection, the track feels less like a remix and more like a cultural reframe, familiar material made deliberately uncomfortable.
Listen below:
