Since the explosion of her Hitkidd-produced viral hit “F.N.F. (Let’s Go),” GloRilla has become a platinum-selling, BET Award-winning, Grammy-nominated rap superstar who has grown into one of the most popular and recognizable voices in music. Just days after the song hit the web, she was being courted for record deals. Within months of the song’s release, she signed with Yo Gotti’s Collective Music Group imprint and put out her 2022 EP, Anyways, Life’s Great, erasing any idea of her being a one-hit wonder as she delivered sex-charged anthems like “Nut Quick” and held her own alongside Cardi B on the remix to her already-solid single “Tomorrow.”
In 2023 she toured as a show-stealing bright spot on dates of Lil Baby’s ill-fated It's Only Us tour and left a mark on the much-ballyhooed Grammy Awards’ Hip-Hop 50th Anniversary medley, where she shined just as strong as veterans like Run-DMC, Public Enemy, Queen Latifah, and Missy Elliott, capping the segment as the last solo performer.
This year she picked up even more momentum, crashing Billboard charts with her major label mixtape debut, Ehhthang, Ehhthang, featuring the self-congratulatory “Yeah Glo!” and “Wanna Be” featuring Megan Thee Stallion, whom she just spent two months opening for during the Hot Girl Summer tour. The sold-out arena tour was the latest evidence of not only women’s current scissor-hold on rap music, but GloRilla’s trajectory to rise from rap princess to queen.
“I ain't gonna lie, I feel like female rappers, we automatically rap about fun shit,” says Glo, attempting to explain why the masses are taking an interest in the female perspective in rap more now than ever. “Dudes have always made fun songs and lived their lives. Right now it's a moment in time where we have so many women rapping and females really have the spotlight. So we just gotta keep making the turnt shit they like to make women feel even more empowered.”
Her latest smash, “TGIF,” has only ramped up anticipation for her upcoming debut album set to be released later this year, setting a level of expectation she wasn’t facing when she rose from relative obscurity. Judging from the plethora of public appearance on her Instagram feed, ranging from Biden’s White House to the Pittsburgh Steelers practice facility, GloRilla is fully aware she’s not in Memphis anymore, but she hopes to strike a balance where she can remain true to her personal journey—without leaving too many listeners behind.
“Even with some of my favorite artists, I notice [their music] was better before they got real rich,” says Glo, whose every word is punctuated by her pearly white teeth with a diamond encrusted canine on the left side. “I remember when I used to be like, ‘Dang, they’re rapping about shit I can't relate to now.’ So now I try to keep that in mind. I gotta always be able to relate to the streets and to the trenches and where I came from.”
While she is tight-lipped on the working title and other details surrounding the album, she does reveal that listeners can expect more of the “turnt” energy she’s known for as well as her penchant for delivering at least a few introspective offerings. Having just turned 25, Glo is becoming cognizant of how she wants to present herself to the world as she matures.
“I feel old now,” she moans as she swivels around in her chair. “I feel like I'm just gonna start acting old and start dressing more mature. I ain’t finna be wearing booty shorts no more.”
She stops mid swivel, “Well, yes I am. I'm lying.”
Above all else, Glo looks forward to leaning more into her own style instead of spreading herself too thin trying to make music to match every hot trend. It’s a mistake she says she learned from when her fans let her know they weren’t feeling her stab at New York drill music on 2023’s “Cha Cha Cha” featuring Brooklyn rapper Fivio Foreign.
“I'm gonna be in different pockets on this album, but I'm still being me,” says Glo, delicately ashing her blunt with her ornamented fingernails as she also inquires about the ETA of her food order. “I want to make songs that I don’t hear out in the world right now. Songs about how I feel and things I know other people go through too, but they probably don’t have a song they go listen to when they’re feeling like that. I'm not gonna go too out of my pocket, though. People don't like when I go too out of my element.”
She’s especially excited about a track tentatively titled “Rain Down On Me,” which she describes as a “full-out gospel song,” and “You Don’t Deserve My Friend,” where she speaks on domestic abuse. Add this to hopes of exploring some country music elements, and it appears that Glo is wanting to give listeners varying slices of the Tennessee she knows.
Raised in North Memphis’ Frayser neighborhood, the rapper born Gloria Hallelujah Woods grew up in a conservative Christian household as the eighth of 10 children. She originally had aspirations of being a gospel singer, but picking up habits like smoking weed and getting exposed to rap music in her early teens derailed those plans. After graduating from Martin Luther King Jr. College Preparatory High School, she did what many Memphians her age did—got a job at either the Nike, FedEx, or Amazon warehouse.
During her down time, she kept herself entertained by repeating raps in her head to beats she logged to memory and then rushing to her phone after her shift to write the lyrics down. Encouraged by her friends and relatives, Glo began recording and releasing music starting with 2019’s Most Likely Up Next and 2020’s P Status. Garnering traction online through social media rapping challenges, Glo began building a fanbase and doing shows anywhere within a three-hour drive from home, including small towns in Arkansas, Mississippi, and Missouri, before “F.N.F.” took her nationwide.
While she credits Chicago rapper Chief Keef’s similarly sudden rise in 2012 for inspiring her to start a rap career, GloRilla’s style is a direct descendant of ‘90s- and 2000s-era Memphis rap, when Three Six Mafia and its extended family was the biggest show in town. The collective essentially gave the city its sound: a mixture of bluesy, bass-driven, haunting beats that serve as a bed for gritty, confrontational lyrics or, in layman’s terms, shit-talking.
The combination has delivered some of the most unique voices in rap, and Glo has payed homage by borrowing Three Six Mafia co-founder Juicy J’s trademark “yeah hoe” adlib and flipping it into the chorus for “Yeah Glo” and again on “Lick Or Sum, a surprisingly even raunchier ode to J’s solo magnum opus, “Slob on My Knob.” On “Wanna Be” she interpolates the hook to the inimitable Project Pat’s 2001 hit “Don’t Save Her” and from there carries on the tradition of Southern female rappers, namely fellow Memphis artists the late Gangsta Boo and La Chat, who earned respect for taking up just as much space as their male counterparts on the mic, often outclassing them on the same song.
“We’re different,” Glo proudly says about the lineage of female Memphis rappers she comes from, subconsciously balling her tattooed fists mid-sentence. “Memphis is a gritty, ruthless place. We gotta be hard because the n-ggas is hard. They talk a lot of shit, and it just rubs off on the females.”
Even though Glo embraces and wears those qualities on her tatted arm sleeves, they’re also what made her leave home as her profile rose. While other Southern cities like Atlanta, Houston, Miami, New Orleans, and Nashville have long been incubators for musicians or desirable spots to relocate to, Memphis has kept a reputation of being too small for its own good, with many of its stars leaving for greener pastures to tap into better resources, or escape the toxic jealousy. Glo likes to keep up with what’s going on in her old stomping grounds through Facebook, where she theorizes “the ghetto shit is still happening” because “the millionaires are on Instagram and Twitter.”
“The goal is to love Memphis, be from Memphis, but get out of Memphis,” says Glo, who has ambitions of using her success and influence to create opportunities for more people back home. To date she’s done this by donating $20,000 to her high school alma mater and hiring a handful of her childhood friends to be her staff. “I want to see the violence go down and make the school system better. It’s a long list of things I wanna do, but hopefully one day I can do it.”
Right now though, GloRilla is just looking forward to the short list of things she has to do today. One of them is returning to the studio tonight to continue working on her album. The other is to dig into her long-awaited food order from local soul food staple Busy Bee that has just arrived from across town.
“You might not want to look at me,” she warns, as she temporarily takes her eyes from her plate. A far cry from her line in “TGIF” where she brags, “I’m looking fine as hell, I’m trying to be seen.”
Shifting her focus back to her go-to order of fried catfish, baked beans, and broccoli-cheese casserole, she pauses.
“I’m about to fuck this food up.”
