At just 22, Monaleo has already been through it. Before the Houston musician became a viral sensation and Ivy Park ambassador, expectant mother and rising rap royalty, she was a young girl from Missouri City dealing with suicidal ideation as young as fourth grade, surviving intimate partner violence, and coping by developing a “fascination” with death so matter-of-fact that she once studied mortuary science. So even though she’s spent the past two years enjoying the deserved popularity of her gloved-up-fighter singles—especially “Beating Down Yo Block,” the 2021 banger begging to be blasted from a lowrider truck—success has made her somewhat circumspect, too. On her debut album, Where the Flowers Don’t Die, she aims to fill out the contours of an ascendant star, determined to complicate her tough-talking persona and detail everything she went through to get here.
From the top, Where the Flowers Don’t Die signals that Monaleo is serious. On “Sober Mind,” a slow boom-bap textured with piano chords, she raps about clear-headedness and vanquishing her darker impulses: “This little mind of my mine it take time/If I ever get to thinking too much I take five/I be damned if I let a bad thought take mine.” Her pensiveness is surprisingly traditional, hewing to the rap classicism that tends to intrigue old heads; here it’s about the timeless musicality of her words and the lilt of her sentiment. Monaleo replicates the approach on the deceptively lovely breakup flamethrower “Return of the P” as well as “Ridgemont Baby,” a gutting memoir over a Tom Brock sample in which she transforms a diss into a plaintive family portrait. “You bitches grew up with family dogs in a two-story/So in other words bitch you don’t know the half,” she admonishes her bougier enemies, and then: “What you know ’bout boiling hot water just to take a bath/We was four deep in a one-bedroom, you do the math.” It gets rougher and more resilient from there; she’s really been through it.
These tracks provide personal context and a deep backdrop for her punchier numbers, including “Beating Down Yo Block” and the Southern bad bitch anthem “Ass Kickin.” When she tells an eager but marginally useful man that “you gon’ pay for what Kirk did to Rasheeda” on the latter track, she raps with the same cutting cadence as the iconic Atlanta rapper she namechecks: succinct, consonant-forward, voice low and bubbling like pavement tar, elucidating the finer points of a cunnilingus pump-and-dump strategy. (Its video depicts Monaleo’s pregnant posse administering beatdowns at the OB-GYN, and cross-cuts to a fetus breakdancing in the womb.) Monaleo can be funny and tough, emotional and direct, broadly versatile in tenor and style with a distinctly Texan flair, and it’s a blast to hear her growing into her talent.