GloRilla had the nagging sense that something didn’t sound right. The North Memphis rapper, then only 20 years old, had just released her debut mixtape, Most Likely Up Next. The evocation of high school was intentional, down to the clean pink graduation cap and gown she donned on its cover; the optimism and possibility that image implies are channeled through songs like the swaggering “Steph Curry” or the raucous “GMFU,” where Glo darts across the mix like an Animaniac who listens to Project Pat. But there was something else that made that tape sound, to her, slighter than it was meant to be.
“I was trying to be more feminine,” GloRilla says today, while weaving across the country in preparation for the release of her highly anticipated major label debut, Anyways, Life’s Great…, out now via Interscope and Yo Gotti’s Collective Music Group. “I’ve [naturally] got a deeper voice, but I was trying to sound like a girl.” Glo goes on to explain the pressure she was feeling to lighten up, to sit on top of the increasingly thunderous beats she favored, rather than to sink into them with her now-signature drawl. Fortunately, some people in her corner recognized this and validated her instincts to be herself. Friends “were telling me to put a little bass in my voice,” she says of that period. “That’s when I started changing.”
The change paid dividends almost immediately. There is more rap music being released today than at any other point in history, and much of the hip-hop garnering close attention comes from Memphis. This recognition is long overdue; the city’s rap scene has long been one of the country’s most creatively daring, and its influence has been widespread. This was true as soon as Memphis rappers gained national attention in the 1990s—see the way acts like 8Ball & MJG colored in the most hedonistic club music with raps that were more personal, or the way the extended Three 6 Mafia family laid the blueprint for the horrorcore movement that was about to explode. Memphis became belatedly inescapable at the top of the last decade when hip-hop’s cleanest new movements (the hyper staccato triplet flow that the Migos repopularized over shimmering Atlanta production; the manicured syrup of early A$AP Rocky) and its dirtiest (the confrontationally lo-fi Raider Klan universe) both borrowed liberally.
The adoption of Memphis sounds by outsiders is only half of the story. In the 2010s, the city once again began to produce national stars, including Young Dolph, who was murdered last year at the age of 36, and Gotti, who scored an unlikely crossover hit with 2015’s “Down in the DM.” Since then, the latter has shored up his legacy as a mogul, making CMG the home for local titans like Moneybagg Yo, Blac Youngsta, and BlocBoy JB, while also expanding to include burgeoning stars from across the country, including Sacramento legend Mozzy, Detroit’s 42 Dugg, Louisville’s EST Gee, and Jacksonville’s Lil Poppa.
While Memphis is rapidly becoming the most crowded rap nexus in the country, a cosign from Gotti carries considerable weight. There are questions about stardom in the moment and others about contributing to an ongoing legacy.
All of this means that Glo, now 23, has a lot riding on her. Many young rappers, when asked about the pressure they do or don’t feel, try to project an air of cool, or imperviousness. (This is understandable: convincing yourself can be the first step to getting a handle on such a potentially volatile situation.) Glo is uninterested in playing those games. “I know people expect a lot out of me,” she says, those people being her fans as well as her support system back home in Memphis.
And so cliches crop up: You worry about the talent being swallowed by the machine, the regional star subsumed into pop homogeneity, the young person saddled with responsibilities they never asked for. Yet in talking to her, none of this seems to apply to Glo. In fact, to hear her tell the story of her rise is to see a world of her own construction come into view. When I ask her about the contrast between that first, unsatisfying mixtape’s title, Most Likely Up Next, and the name of this series, #UpNow—about what it means, in her mind, to be “up now”—she doesn’t hesitate. “I just know that manifestation is real,” she says.
Glo was born in the summer of 1999 and raised largely in the church, as if that needed to be clarified about someone whose birth certificate reads Gloria Hallelujah Woods. Living in the Frayser neighborhood with her brother and a mother who forbade rap, Glo could only absorb the genre in surreptitious bursts while in cars with friends or on the playground. She sang in church, but where some artists find that choir work formative for their voices and their approaches to song structure, for Glo it feels as if that singing happened in a past life. “I probably stopped when I was 10,” she says. “It’s kinda long ago.”
Her mother was simply trying to insulate her children from what was raging outside: “It was just a whole lot of ghetto stuff going on,” Glo recalls of Frayser during the early 2000s. “You know—violence.” But rap did seep in through the crevices of that cocoon. As an adolescent, Glo began writing verses with a cousin, and when she moved to live with her father and attend a public high school, it was as if the cocoon had been shed; she began growing into the colossal personality that would be captured, however imperfectly, on Most Likely Up Next.
While rap had been a hidden interest during Glo’s years at her mother’s house, it’s crucial to note—and evident in her work—that coming into her own as an MC meant treating rap as what it has long been: a social art form. She met a key early collaborator, the South Memphis rapper Gloss Up (now signed to Atlanta’s Quality Control Music) while both were competing in a 2019 talent show. From her earliest records, Glo has exuded the sort of energy that has been refined by hearing how it bounces off of walls, ceilings, car doors, and other people's skeletons. She’s been outside.
After linking with the producer Hitkidd at a showcase, Glo had the opportunity to show and prove. She hopped on a beat that was intended for the Houston superstar Megan Thee Stallion and, rather than try to imitate her style or retreat into time-tested approaches that would cast her as merely competent, Glo exerted her unmissable personality all over the spare instrumental. Within weeks, the demo she laid would come to change her life.
The song was eventually titled “F.N.F. (Let’s Go),” those three letters a pointed acronym declaring Glo “Fuck n***a free.” “I'm S-I-N-G-L-E again,” she raps during the track’s hook—the kind likely to be burned onto a listener’s brain matter before the first listen is over. “F.N.F.” is, somehow, both poised and exuberant, revealing Glo as the rare artist who can control the chaos. Perhaps most importantly, the instant hit is the perfect showcase for her true voice, the one she initially tried to alter.
In its video, Glo and her friends dance around a parking lot, twerk against parked cars, pour Hennessey into one another’s mouths, and pass nursing toddlers into one another’s arms. Not a single man appears. It’s a crystalline distillation of Glo as an artist: someone with once-in-a-lifetime charisma who nevertheless might be hanging out of the car next to you at a stoplight, cackling with her girls.
Growing up, Glo had little sense that the world outside of North Memphis was significantly different than it was within. “I actually thought everywhere was the same,” she says, “except for places on TV, like LA and Miami.” But Glo’s spectacular rise has meant that she’s been able to see more of the country than many do in a lifetime—and that she’s been able to bring Memphis to every corner of the map.
“I was growing up in church, so as a child, I wasn’t into the Memphis rap scene,” Glo says. “I started researching it once I got into high school.” And yet, even while she was scanning through copies of Three 6 Mafia’s Mystic Stylez and 8Ball & MJG’s On Top of the World, she was not immediately aware of the way her personality and voice—her very essence—fell into this lineage. “I never heard it until I had people telling me I’ve got the Memphis sound.”
Some of this is because we become blind to the way we read to outsiders; some is because Memphis has, for 30 years, so thoroughly imprinted itself on hip-hop at large. Yet in the same way that Glo stands out in her city as an obvious star in a clot full of aspirant ones, she sounds uniquely of her hometown even in a hip-hop ecosystem that has xeroxed the drums, the hi-hats, and the drawls a thousand times over. With Glo’s music comes the comfort of recognition and the thrill of the unexpected.
“Gotti told me never get too comfortable,” Glo says when asked for the best advice she’s received since “F.N.F.” took off. And she hasn’t. In the months since that song’s release, she’s followed it with the skeletal “Blessed,” plus “Tomorrow” and its Cardi B-featuring sequel. With each new drop, Glo gets closer to manifesting a version of the 2020s that is not only the product of her hometown’s rich musical tradition but of her own singular vision.
Anyways, Life’s Great… confirms Glo as an artist too savvy to get caught chasing trends or bending to the whims of radio, bracketing lively material, including her celebrated singles, with stark personal revelations on opener “No More Love” and “Out Loud Thinking,” the closing cut that get almost uncomfortably close to the bone. It’s the kind of debut that suggests a depth of experience, both in and out of the recording booth, that cannot be faked or studied from afar. Glo has already been through that—changing who she is to cater to an imagined audience. Like the huskiness in her voice, the project’s point of view is inimitable.
When asked which artist’s career she most wants to emulate, she answers immediately: Beyoncé. What does that mean? That she wants to lean on the visual side of releases? That she aspires to total control of a cross-discipline enterprise? That she needs to dominate Billboard? What is it, precisely, that GloRilla wants?
“Everything.”
Photography by Scrill Davis. Wardrobe & Glam by Harp Media and Creatives. Words by Paul Thompson.
