Rising D&B star Charlotte Plank is living life in the fast lane.

Words: Abigail Firth.

It's the day before Charlotte Plank's debut mixtape drops. This time last year, she'd released one single, and now the full-length 'InHer World' showcases how far she's come in that short time.

"A nine-song mixtape? Including songs with Rudimental? And Turno, Skepsis and Hybrid Minds? I couldn't be prouder of it, really," says Charlotte, seemingly taken aback by her fast rise too.

Although she's swiftly humbled by her current situation, which sees her sitting at home with toothpaste on her spots, slogging her washing around other peoples' houses as her washing machine is broken, and she needs to prepare for another hectic week ahead. She's joining her good pals Venbee and Piri on their respective, separate tours and will be bouncing up and down the UK for a fortnight.

This kind of 100 miles an hour approach to life has become the norm for Charlotte this year, as she's rattled through releases from January onwards before hitting the festival ground running and coming out the other side raring to go in the clubs.

After dropping a series of singles introducing her indie-tinged brand of drum'n'bass, her career was propelled skyward when she was scooped up by chart-topping electronic trio Rudimental to work on the track 'Dancing Is Healing'. It dropped in April and earned her a top-five chart hit, setting an enormous precedent for the rest of the year.

"The Rudimental thing came way sooner than I ever thought," she says. "I thought we'd work together at some point, we obviously had met last summer, but I didn't think we'd collaborate so quickly and the tune would do what it did. Obviously, Rudimental are known for sort of hand-picking and developing young and upcoming artists, and most of them have gone on to do great things like Anne Marie and Jess Glynne, so I guess having that on my head now, you've got to live up to everyone else's expectations. So now I've gotta go do my own thing."

Keen to get cracking with releasing her own tracks, she dropped 'White Noise' shortly after and followed it up with two more bucketlist collaborations, 'Rave Out' with DJs Turno and Skepsis and 'Let U Know' with drum'n'bass producer Danny Byrd. Although there was undeniable pressure to deliver, she wanted to prove she could stand on her own two feet.

"I'm just glad that I'd released stuff before ['Dancing Is Healing'] because I feel like it's very easy being female in dance to get labelled as just a dance feature, which is definitely much better now," explains Charlotte. "Girls in dance music definitely have much more of a space to be respected, and their own artists' projects are taken a lot more seriously. I'd already kind of built my sound; I'm not just jumping on anything. Obviously, it was still a drum'n'bass track, so it still felt relevant to me. I'm in a really lucky position to be able to do both and have people loving both."

Part of a generation ushering in a new era for British dance music, Charlotte is a prominent part of the Loud LDN collective – a group of London-based female and non-binary musicians, which started as a humble group chat and has since started hosting events where its members perform and DJ, the first of which was organised by Charlotte herself – and regularly speaks about the support they have for one another and the ways the tide is turning for women in dance.

"It's just really great to see that females in dance music are finally getting their voice heard a bit now and aren't having to rely on male features. I'm really grateful to be in this world at this point where you're making music whilst everything's shifting."

She continues, "I met Becky Hill for the first time the other week, and she was saying dance music, in general, is in such a nice space because it used to be that all the girls were kind of pitted against each other, and it wasn't very friendly, apparently. But it really feels like a proper community we're building all together. There's me, Venbee, Piri, A Little Sound, and Emily Makis; we're all friends, we come together for events, and all support each other, and I think that counts for so much more than being in competition with one another."

It makes perfect sense, then, that Charlotte's love of music comes from one particular female figure in her life. "I owe all my music tastes to my mum", she says, recounting how her childhood years were spent going on camping holidays with her mum's uni mixtapes playing in the van on the way there. "There was only a tape player in there, and she would play all her little compilations from the 90s. Stuff like The Cure, Nirvana Unplugged, Edie Brickell, I remember that being such a crucial part of my musical DNA."

But the defining characteristic of her music, the rapid-fire drum'n'bass beats, came from much further away from where she now calls home. "I was born in Australia because my mum went travelling over there, and my uncle was a DJ there [playing] sort of 90s acid house raves, so he has a lot of his old records from then. He's even now sending me songs like, 'Sample this!' He openly says he hates drum'n'bass, but he likes house, and he's just like, when are you gonna make some four-four music!"

To her uncle's dismay, no house music makes it onto 'InHer World', just the seven bangers she's released so far – including 'Dancing Is Healing' and the infectious 'Rave Out' that dominated festival stages this summer – plus two new songs. It's deliberately short and sweet as she's holding back releases for next year, and displays her artistic development so far, from DIY beginnings with debut single 'Hate Me', to latest club banger 'Lights'.

"I guess this EP is just my life up until now in a little box, essentially. I've been doing music since I was really, really young, and obviously, I've gone through phases of falling out of love with it and getting frustrated, as everyone does, but it's always been there. When I first started doing gigs when I was like 14, that's when I opened myself up to that world of watching how you can impact people directly. You can see their live reactions, and just getting that buzz and energy off other people when you perform live is a whole other thing. I want this all the time, and to be able to do this to more and more crowds, having your music resonate with people is honestly the best feeling."

She's been doing exactly that at her recently launched 'Skank 4 Plank' parties, with a clear intention of taking over 2024. She wants more summer anthems, more collaborations, more festivals, and an international tour that'll see her revisit her hometown of Melbourne. "I'm manifesting more chaos, more hectic energy," she says, "to go back to all the festivals, hopefully on bigger stages, building my little Skank 4 Plank army, I guess. Here we come."