GloRilla, hip-hop’s master motivator, concludes her message: DNyuz

GloRilla is always on the clock these days. Last month, native rapper Gloria Hallelujah Woods stomped and bounced through her hits “Yeah Glo!” and “TGIF” at the MTV Video Music Awards, and spent the next morning at a photo shoot.

By the time she arrived at Jungle City Studios in Manhattan around 9 p.m., her signature bravado was in short supply. Nursing a mild cold, she wrapped herself in a thick woolen blanket and practically lay on her back on the couch. But, she explained, she planned to keep plodding through her exhaustion. “I don’t take having a lot of work for granted anymore,” she said. “I can’t complain that there was a lot on my plate when my goal was to eat.”

GloRilla, 25, left Memphis in 2022 with the release of her single “FNF (Let’s Go),” recorded at the end of a 60-day fast — no men, no booze — that she says changed the trajectory of her life. The excellently singable statements about ‘FREE’ and ‘SINGLE’ were ideal fodder for TikTok, radio and the Grammys of that year, where the song was nominated for best rap performance. One viral song spawned another: “Tomorrow 2,” featuring Cardi B, which jumped into the Top 10 less than six months after “FNF” came out.

GloRilla played with relative conservatism in the months that followed. In late 2022, she released an EP, ‘Anyways, Life’s Great…’, and a deluxe edition a few months later. She spent much of 2023 on the festival circuit and earlier this year shared “Ehhthang Ehhthang,” an upbeat mixtape that includes “Wanna Be,” a modest hit she shared with Megan Thee Stallion, who took her on a global tour this summer . On October 11 she will release her debut album ‘Glorious’, more than two years after she became the ‘next big thing’.

It was a bit of a slow burn for a budding rap star, a genre in which hits bloom and wither with astonishing speed. The relatively patient output wasn’t that by design: GloRilla was figuring out the quicksand of her new stardom and how much she wanted to expand the sound that launched her.

“Last year, when I was first working on my album, I tried to make everything big, and I had to catch myself,” she said matter-of-factly. “I wanted to start reaching out to fun international artists and making big sounding songs, and the Memphis-style beats are what people like to hear from me.”

Those early viral singles, totaling less than six minutes, encapsulate almost all of GloRilla’s market proposition: her tough-yet-optimistic lyrics, delivered with a raspy bark that seemingly contradicts her Bratz doll image, can draw audiences of different genders into bring movement. GloRilla said she gets a kick out of fans’ reactions to her playing with the masculine and feminine. ‘They say:’Okay“It’s a girl (expletive) she says, but she says it super aggressively.” But I’m like: hey, that’s what makes it fun.”

Growing up in Memphis, the third youngest of ten, Beyoncé albums like ‘Four’ and ‘B’Day’ gave GloRilla that sense of empowerment. Her mother was deeply religious and mainly forbade pop and rap in the house, preferring gospel records and soul artists such as Smokey Robinson and Anita Baker. Secular music was smuggled in: sometimes GloRilla and her siblings would watch “106 & Park” or “BET Countdown”; her older brothers stole CDs of Lil Wayne — “He was the first rapper that I thought was the greatest of all time,” she said — Three 6 Mafia and Drake from Walmart and played them on the family PlayStation.

GloRilla and her siblings were homeschooled until fifth grade, when an older sister called Child Protective Services on their mother and they attended public school. “I was hurt by it, but it was better to be around other kids and be more social,” she said. “We all looked at my sister like a traitor when she did it.”

At the age of 15, GloRilla went to live with her father full-time. The power in her mother’s house had been out for two weeks and rats and cockroaches were coming in; GloRilla and her siblings had been bathing with bottled water and, she said, began developing “a certain smell.” Their father, a postal worker, was “always the least strict parent,” GloRilla said, and he allowed her to get a phone for the first time. After being introduced to artists such as Chief Keef, Rich Homie Quan and Future at school, she started listening to rap unencumbered. Within a few years she followed a cousin to a studio, where she wrote and recorded her first songs.

By the time she was 19, GloRilla was using money from a series of shifts—FedEx, Checkers, Rally’s, Nike—to finance studio sessions, booking by the hour, $50 each. Eventually, she noticed that people liked what she released. “My third song that I released was shared a lot on Facebook. I’m like, ‘Okay, they’re digging it,'” she recalled.

In 2021, she said, she went “constantly viral.” GloRilla’s YouTube page serves as a document of her rise: her earliest songs, like the “146 Freestyle,” in which she raps in a higher, more generic vocal tone, have views in the tens of thousands; later songs on which she has deepened her voice, such as a remix of HD4President’s ‘Can’t Stop Jiggin’, have received hundreds of thousands and sometimes millions of views.

“Glorious” is GloRilla’s attempt to show not just her tough talk or her ability to give strength, but also her softer side. One song, “Rain Down on Me,” features Kirk Franklin, her favorite gospel artist growing up, whom she met at the Grammys last year. When they first spoke, Franklin recalled in a telephone interview, he thought she was joking about her love for him, given the brashness of her music. “I fell in love with her personality; she’s just a charismatic little girl who looks like her first time at Disney World,” he said. “I was attracted to the purity, the spirit of her desire to work with me.”

GloRilla said collaborating with Franklin means “the world to me” because of his importance during her childhood and the opportunity the song gave her to convey where she came from. “I have a nice, upside-down side, but I always go back. “I always have to remember my roots – I try to keep a lot of memories,” she said. “I try to remain recognizable to the people where I come from.”

That duality has helped GloRilla stand out among an increasingly crowded field of emerging rappers. Timbaland, who produced one song on “Glorious,” said in a phone interview that when “FNF” came out, she had “a Memphis girl style that wasn’t really an attack on the game at the time.” He added: “When you see her and you hear that aggressive tone coming from her little body, you just think, ‘Wow.’”

Their collaboration on the new album, the frustrated, uptempo “Stop Playing With That Girl,” shows a more revealing side of GloRilla – “I don’t like to be open about my pain,” she raps – without bowing to the conventions of songs meant to show an artist’s vulnerability. There’s no somber piano or weepy R&B hook, and GloRilla doesn’t soften her delivery just because of the subject matter: the ways men play with women’s emotions.

She wrote it early last year, after feeling like she had had enough of manipulative men. “I was talking about all the girls around the world – tell him whatever you do, stop playing with you because you can overcome your obstacles,” she said. “Whether I’m talking (expletives), being kind, pouring my heart out, I’m always trying to empower women in some way.”

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