On Oct. 11, GloRilla will release her debut album, “Glorious,” more than two years after becoming a next big thing.
Credit...Myesha Evon for The New York Times

GloRilla, Hip-Hop’s Master Motivator, Rounds Out Her Message

Self-empowerment rhymes catapulted her onto rap’s A-list. On “Glorious,” her debut LP, she’s hoping that showing more sides of her personality will help her stay there.

by · NY Times

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

By the time she arrived at Jungle City Studios in Manhattan, around 9 p.m., her trademark bravado was in short supply. Nursing a mild cold, she swaddled herself in a thick woolen blanket and laid practically supine on a couch. But, she explained, she intended to keep slogging through her exhaustion. “I don’t take having a lot of work for granted no more,” she said. “I can’t complain about a lot being on my plate when my goal was to eat.”

GloRilla, 25, burst out of Memphis in 2022 with the release of her single “F.N.F. (Let’s Go),” recorded at the end of a 60-day fast — no men, no liquor — that she said changed the trajectory of her life. Its eminently chantable affirmations about being “F-R-E-E” and “S-I-N-G-L-E” proved ideal fodder for TikTok, radio and that year’s Grammys, where the song was nominated for best rap performance. One viral track begot another: “Tomorrow 2,” with Cardi B, vaulted into the Top 10 less than six months after “F.N.F.” dropped.

GloRilla played the months that followed with a relative conservatism. She released an EP, “Anyways, Life’s Great …,” at the end of 2022, and a deluxe edition a few months later. She spent much of 2023 on the festival circuit and earlier this year shared “Ehhthang Ehhthang,” a sprightly mixtape that featured “Wanna Be,” a modest hit she shared with Megan Thee Stallion, who brought her on a global tour this summer. On Oct. 11, she’ll release her debut album “Glorious,” more than two years after becoming a next big thing.

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

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

Those early viral singles sum up, in less than six minutes total, almost the entirety of GloRilla’s market proposition: Her tough but optimistic lyrics, delivered with a husky bark seemingly at odds with her Bratz doll image, can move audiences across genders. GloRilla said she gets a kick out of fans’ reactions to her playing with the masculine and feminine. “They be like, ‘Okaaay, it’s some girl [expletive] she’s saying, but she’s saying it super aggressive.’ But I’m like hey, that’s what makes it fun.”

Growing up in Memphis, the third youngest of 10, Beyoncé albums like “Four” and “B’Day” gave GloRilla that sense of empowerment. Her mother was deeply religious, and mostly prohibited pop and rap in the house, preferring gospel records and soul artists like 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 would steal CDs by Lil Wayne — “He was the first rapper I thought was the greatest of all time,” she said — Three 6 Mafia and Drake from Walmart and play them on the family PlayStation.

GloRilla and her siblings were home-schooled until fifth grade, when an older sister called child protective services on their mother and they were enrolled in public school. “I was hurt by it, but it was better to be around other kids, be more social,” she said. “We all looked at my sister like a traitor when she did it.”

At 15, GloRilla began living with her father full time. The power in her mother’s house had been out for two weeks, and rats and cockroaches moved in; GloRilla and her siblings had been bathing with bottled water, and, she said, had begun to develop “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 like Chief Keef, Rich Homie Quan and Future at school, she began listening to rap unencumbered. Within a few years, she trailed a cousin to a studio, where she wrote and recorded her earliest tracks.

By the time she was 19, GloRilla was using money from a succession of shift jobs — FedEx, Checkers, Rally’s, Nike — to fund studio sessions, booked an hour at a time, $50 a pop. Eventually, she noticed that people liked what she was releasing. “My third song I put out, it got a lot of shares on Facebook. I’m like ‘OK, they digging it’,” she recalled.

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

“Glorious” is GloRilla’s attempt to showcase not just her tough talk or her ability to empower, but her softer side, too. One track, “Rain Down on Me,” features Kirk Franklin, her favorite gospel artist when she was growing up, who she met at the Grammys last year. When they first spoke, Franklin recalled in a phone 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 looking like her first time in Disney World,” he said. “I was attracted to the purity, the spirit, of her desire to work with me.”

GloRilla said the collaboration with Franklin means “everything 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 fun, turnt 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 stay relatable to the people that’s where I came from.”

That duality has helped GloRilla stand out among an increasingly crowded field of rising rappers. Timbaland, who produced one song on “Glorious,” said in a phone interview that when “F.N.F.” came out, she had a “Memphis girl flavor that wasn’t really attacking the game at that time.” He added: “When you see her and you hear that aggressive tone come out of her little body, you just be like ‘Whoa.’”

Their collaboration on the new album, the frustrated, up-tempo “Stop Playing With That Girl,” showcases a more revealing side of GloRilla — “I don’t like opening up about my pain,” she raps — without bowing to the conventions of tracks meant to showcase an artist’s vulnerability. There’s no morose piano, or weepy R&B hook, and GloRilla doesn’t soften her delivery just because of the subject matter: the ways in which men toy 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 — like, no matter what you do, tell him stop playing with you, because you can beat your obstacles,” she said. “Whether I’m talking [expletive], being nice, pouring my heart out, I’m always trying to somehow empower women.”

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