There’s a surge of adrenaline that races through your veins when you smash a piece of office furniture with a sledgehammer. The crunching of wood splintering under steel. The symphony of shattered glass cascading to the floor. It’s a feeling that’s all the more satisfying when GloRilla’s spirited declaration of independence from fuckboys, “F.N.F. (Let’s Go),” blares on loudspeakers and the Memphis rapper herself encourages you to take another swing at an executive desk.
It's a few days after GloRilla’s 24th birthday and we’re inside a sweltering warehouse in downtown Los Angeles that’s been repurposed into a maze of rage rooms. We are dressed in thick polyester protective coveralls; Glo’s pink gossamer-polished nails are tucked into work gloves, and her flowy jet-black wig is clamped under a neon-hued hard hat. Piles of glass and wood chunks surround us as we tear apart the desk and a vanity mirror. A primal scream occasionally emerges from elsewhere in the warehouse, but we are mostly giggling through our destruction.
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“Oh, you really mad, huh?” Glo jokes after I take a big swing with the sledgehammer that she’s handed me.
GloRilla is having the kind of year every rookie artist dreams of—particularly one in hip-hop, a genre that moves at the speed of light. Since dropping her earworm “F.N.F. (Let’s Go)” in spring of 2022, she’s performed at the Grammys (where she also had her first nomination, best rap performance, for “F.N.F.”); released a hit EP; played a buzzy set at Coachella; signed to Memphis rap legend Yo Gotti’s Collective Music Group label; dropped a top 10 Hot 100 hit with Cardi B, “Tomorrow 2”; and toured arenas across the nation. And all of this before releasing her debut album, which isn’t set to arrive until early next year.
Gloria Hallelujah Woods was born and raised in Frayser, a small suburb on the north side of Memphis. The eighth of 10 kids, Glo grew up in a conservative Christian household in which, it’s safe to say, the plan was not for her to blow up with a record proclaiming to be “F-r-e-e, fuck n-gga free” (even if the refrain is, arguably, a kind of gospel).
“We really couldn't listen to the radio. Never got a Christmas present from my mama a day in my life. We didn't do Valentine's Day. We didn't do Easter. We didn't do Halloween. Really only did the Fourth of July, and Thanksgiving,” Glo says. “My mama was strict—but apparently I still ended up doing what I wanted to do.”
GloRilla was homeschooled for much of her childhood, with a brief reprieve before she was expelled from the seventh grade for fighting. The strict upbringing made her feel isolated from reality.
“I was socially sheltered,” she says. “I didn't really know the outside world, other than church and my siblings—so I really didn't know myself. By the time I finally [went to a traditional school] I was 10, I was around all these other different people and personalities, and I guess it brought me out.”
Like many church kids, Glo and her siblings discovered rap through stolen glimpses of television, in her case, watching Lil Wayne and Three 6 Mafia on BET’s teen countdown show 106 & Park. Because she was forbidden from listening to secular music, Glo and her siblings had to get creative to access it. “We used to steal Lil Wayne and Drake CDs from Walmart,” she says with a laugh. “We’d steal the CDs and download all the songs onto the PlayStation. That was the only way we could listen to other music. We probably wouldn't have known nothing other than gospel music if it wasn't for us being bad.”
After high school, a cousin encouraged Glo to get serious about rap (and suggested she change her moniker from Big Glo to GloRilla). She had been dabbling, posting freestyle challenges online, when one day, in 2018, her cousin booked a studio session for her. Her debut mixtape, 2019’s Most Likely Up Next, sounds entirely different from the GloRilla of today. Back then she was sanding down the grittier texture of her tone in favor of a softer voice. It was an attempt, she says, to sound more like what you might expect from a petite, round-the-way girl like her, and cover up the natural register that at that time made her feel insecure.
Glo speaks the way she raps: with urgency, slurring her consonants to the point it sounds like she’s chewing her words. Her natural speaking voice has a thick, husky lilt that comes out even deeper when she’s performing—which she thinks makes her music appealing to male rap fans who might not normally ride around listening to women rappers.
Glo secured her first hit in 2022, in the quick, improvised way that many of them now arrive. Memphis producer Hitkidd had made the beat with Megan Thee Stallion in mind, and when he didn’t hear back from her on it, he reached out to Glo to jump on the track. They cut a demo a few hours later, and she posted a snippet to Triller, a short-form video app popular with Gen Z. After the clip started doing numbers there, they went back to the studio to flesh the song out, shot a DIY-style music video the same night, and finalized the record and uploaded it to YouTube the next morning. It hit number one on Billboard’s Mainstream R&B/Hip-Hop Airplay chart four months later and achieved platinum status by the end of the year.
A hit record can be measured in chart positions, where it lands on radio and tastemaking playlists, the reaction it gets when a DJ puts it on at the club, or stans arguing its supremacy online. But there’s nothing like the electricity of hearing it in a packed arena. It’s the night after our first meeting and Glo is leading roughly 20,000 people through a singalong of “F.N.F. (Let’s Go).” Women shout the lyrics like praise and worship, many making videos of themselves rapping along for clips that will undoubtedly make their way to social media or maybe some chump’s phone after the show is over.
Glo is clad in red leather cargo pants and a matching bralette. She’s flanked by a cadre of dancers that move with a militant precision. Two of Glo’s best friends, Marcola Wilkins and Marceva Taylor, are on risers throwing an impressive amount of ass to hype the crowd. R&B star turned creative director Teyana Taylor worked closely with Glo to create a show befitting a rising rap artist—tight choreography, sultry moves, well-paced banter. But I can’t help but notice that Glo doesn’t seem entirely at ease onstage. She’s still developing in real time, something we rarely get to see with young rap acts, given the relentless pace of the genre.
“I'm always open to trying new shit. You got to step out your comfort zone. If you're comfortable, you're never going to grow,” she tells me after the show. “I'm going to try everything. If it works, it works, if it don't, it don't. But at least I tried it, you know? I can't dance, but I'm going to try to dance, give them a show, try to put different emotions into it.”
Do you feel you have to? I ask.
“I don't feel like I have to, but I want to. I want to explore different shit like, okay maybe I might start liking it. Maybe this is what I needed or maybe this is what I'm missing, so I'm just open to everything,” she says. “For instance, I can't sing, but if somebody try to make me start with some auto tuning, I'm going to try it. If it's horrible, it's horrible. If it sounds good, bam. Maybe if I try to show I’m more feminine, it might grow my male fan base. Maybe if I try a pop song, I can grow an audience [there]. You got to step out your comfort zone.”
This is the dilemma women in hip-hop have faced since its birth 50 years ago. Misogyny and patriarchy is engrained in rap culture, despite women’s innovations and contributions to the genre. It’s a world of fractured gender politics, where a woman’s autonomy over her body, image, and sexual desire is scrutinized—unless it’s explicitly positioned for the male gaze. As a result, only a few women can seem to ascend in the genre at any given time, and even fewer enjoy continued success.
Glo is in a cohort of young women offering refreshing counterpoints to their male peers. She delivers chest-beating, shit-talking, and ribald pussy rap with equal aplomb, while also making space to speak directly to the experiences of young women through introspective records about heartbreak, betrayal, and abortion.
This influx of diverse young women dominating rap on their own terms has turned even some of the horniest men into proselytizing saints. When Glo and I met, Fabolous had just gone viral for criticizing female rappers for not talking about “real shit,” a refrain we’ve heard from male rappers for years. When I bring this up, Glo rolls her eyes. “What men rap about? Killing, fucking, robbing, cars, money.”
“Females rapping about the same shit,” she continues. “But guess what? We're not killing. We're not in gangs. We’re not robbing. That's what men be doing. What we doing? We're sitting pretty, we're popping our shit, we're hustling, we're getting money. We fuck, so we rap about what we do.”
Backstage in her dressing room after the show, Glo sits at a vanity, analyzing different angles of her performance as captured by her team on several smartphones. The crew passes around a bottle of Taylor Port. Various entourages parade through the room to congratulate her, but she’s focused on the screens in her lap.
“How did I sound?” she asks. “Did it look good?”
“[The audience] wasn’t turnt enough,” Marceva Taylor huffs, as she passes a blunt to Glo, who takes a deep drag between sips of the wine.
“I think it could have been better,” Glo says. “But it felt good.”
PRODUCTION CREDITS:
Photographs by Julius Frazer
Styled by Brandon Tan
Hair by Tredreco Butler
Makeup by Breana Dufor
Manicure by Julia Fontaine
Tailoring by Ksenia Golub
Special thanks to The Hotel Chelsea
