8Ville — Official Music Video

24/8 is a Melbourne-based rapper known for blending razor-sharp wordplay with raw, unfiltered honesty. Since a serious brain injury, he's lived with chronic Post-Concussion Syndrome, complex PTSD, and chronic pain — and turned to music as a lifeline, channeling that daily reality into a sound that draws comparisons to Eminem, Hopsin, and Ren.

He's shared the mic and collaborated with artists including Bizarre of D12 and Tony Madness, proving Australian hip hop can hold its own on the world stage. His EP "8Ville" digs into identity, inner conflict, and the fight to stay standing — cementing 24/8 as one of the most compelling new voices in the scene.

Taking Some Time

I wanted to speak directly to everyone who's been rocking with me. I've been putting real time into my mental health lately, and that's meant stepping back from the studio for a bit. Now I'm starting to work on new music again, and I'm excited about where it's heading.

Appreciate everyone who's stuck with me through it all. More music is on the way — for now, thanks for understanding.

Living With Chronic Pain

People see the stage, the visuals, the energy in a track like "8Ville," and they assume that's the whole picture. What they don't see is the version of me that exists before I ever step up to a mic — the one dealing with pain that never really clocks off.

I'm not going to sit here and pretend I've got it figured out, because I haven't. What I have learned is that pretending it isn't there is the fastest way to make everything worse. For a long time I tried to push through like the pain was something to beat, something weak about me if I let it slow me down. That mindset nearly finished me. Strength isn't gritting your teeth until you break. Strength is being honest about your limits and still finding a way to create something.

Music became the place I could put it. Not fix it — put it. There's a difference. Writing doesn't make the pain go away, but it gives it somewhere to go that isn't just sitting in my body making me angrier and more isolated.

If you're living with this too, I'm not going to give you some inspirational wrap-up line like it all works out if you just stay positive. Some days are genuinely hard and there's no shortcut around that. What I will say is you're not weak for struggling with something your body puts you through every single day. 8Ville was never about pretending the pain isn't real. It's about proving you can still create something honest while it is.

Fear of CTE

This one's harder to write than most. There's a fear that sits underneath everything else since my injury, and it doesn't come from the pain or the flashbacks or the bad days. It comes from not knowing what's actually happening inside my own head long-term.

CTE isn't something you can test for while you're alive. That's the part that messes with me the most. You can't get a scan and get an answer. You just live with the question. I want to be honest about this because I know I'm not the only one carrying it. Anyone who's had a serious head injury, anyone who's played contact sport — that fear is common, even if nobody's talking about it out loud.

What's helped is actually naming it instead of running from it. I've also had to make peace with the fact that fear like this doesn't have a tidy resolution. I don't know what the future holds for my brain. Nobody in my position does. What I do know is that today, I can still write. I can still create. That has to be enough to build a life on.

If you're sitting with this same fear, you're not being dramatic and you're not overreacting. Just don't let it carry you into silence. Talk to someone. Keeping it locked up alone is the heaviest way to hold it.

How to Live With Complex PTSD

I want to say straight away — I'm not a doctor, and this isn't a treatment plan. This is just what living with complex PTSD actually looks like from where I'm standing, and a few things that have made it more liveable for me.

Complex PTSD isn't one bad memory you flinch at. It's more like your whole nervous system got rewired around threat. The biggest shift for me was stopping the fight against my own reactions. Once I started treating my reactions as information instead of failure — my body's way of saying something doesn't feel safe — I could actually start working with myself instead of against myself.

Routine has been massive for me. Music is still where a lot of it gets processed. Not performing it — writing it, in the quiet, before anyone else hears it. That's where the honesty happens. 8Ville exists because I needed somewhere to put things that didn't have anywhere else to go.

If you're living with this, the biggest thing I'd say is: you're not broken, and you're not "too much." Your nervous system adapted to survive something. Give yourself the same patience you'd give anyone else recovering from an injury — because that's exactly what this is, even though nobody can see it on a scan.

Living With an ABI

An acquired brain injury doesn't announce itself the way people expect. There's no cast, no visible sign, nothing that tells the world "this person is dealing with something." You just look like you. Meanwhile everything about how your brain processes the world has shifted underneath the surface.

There's a grief that comes with an ABI that doesn't get talked about enough — grieving who you were before, without that meaning you hate who you are now. It's more like building a new relationship with your own mind, one that respects what it can do now instead of constantly measuring it against what it used to do.

8Ville, as a name and a place, came directly out of this. I needed a way to describe the internal world an ABI creates — somewhere you retreat to when your own head becomes a battleground.

If you're living with a brain injury, visible or not, I see you. You're not making it up, and you're not failing at recovery just because it isn't linear. Some days you survive it. Some days you create something out of it. Both count.