The rapper’s second album works when she lets down her brash facade and opens up
Hip-hop heiress Coi Leray had a crossover second with “Gamers,” a boastful observe that makes use of the synth arpeggios that streaked throughout the pioneering Grandmaster Flash minimize “The Message” to flip the script 2023-style: “Women is gamers too,” Leray declares amidst boasts about her womanly prowess and warnings to any potential suitors whose financial institution accounts won’t be as much as snuff. Leray’s posturing and the instantly identifiable pattern helped propel “Gamers” to the highest ten of the Sizzling 100.
On her second album, she front-loads the proceedings with tweaks to the “Gamers” method—the primary voice you hear doesn’t belong to Leray however a pitched-down Daryl Corridor, whose observe with John Oates “Wealthy Woman” will get flipped into “Bitch Woman,” which places different ladies on the market on discover. Interpolations of Technotronic’s “Pump Up the Jam” (on the David Guetta-assisted party-starter “Make My Day”), The Ronettes’ “Be My Child” (on the aggressively sex-positive “My Physique”) observe in fast succession; all through, the tracks are temporary however potent and pugilistic, with the massive hooks adopted up by Leray’s flurry of verbal punches.
Because the file nears its shut, although, the proceedings get extra compelling, with Leray dropping her façade and letting issues breathe a bit. There’s one other apparent interpolation—James Brown even will get characteristic billing on “Man’s World,” which spins his 1966 traditional “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World” into high-drama entice. Right here, although, the lyrics are seething and bruised, with Leray utilizing her ethereal higher register to ask a query: “If it’s a person’s world/ Then why’d you permit me in it?” On “Black Rose,” one other Guetta collaboration, Leray surrounds herself in large riffs, meaty DJ scratches, and gang yells in an replace of mid-Eighties Def Jam that makes her menacing lyrics (“Why they wanna push me?/ They know they’ll’t shush me”) hit more durable. The nearer “Come and Go” exhibits Leray at her most susceptible, its icy synths and heavy vocal results cloaking her as she muses on her previous and her emotions of battle about being impartial but felling alone. The impact is one among Leray navigating the unforgiving mild of day that shines after Coi’s party-heavy first half, however that illumination additionally reveals the human on the coronary heart of Coi.
