Dej loaf try me genre full#

On Sell Sole II, the jersey-rocking, shit-talking Dej is back in full effect. It’s also telling that within months of signing on to Columbia, she was being pushed to trade in her oversized hockey jerseys - a throwback to the baggy looks of MC Lyte and TLC - for designer lingerie in video shoots. It’s worth noting that Dej’s Freshman cover was the first in two years to feature a female artist (it actually had two, Dej and Tink - another casualty of the major label system who’s flourished as an independent artist after leaving her mentor Timbaland’s imprint in 2018). But as one of the bridges between those two styles, she’s been left out of the conversation for far too long. On her arrival, Dej Loaf already represented a departure from the trappings of traditionalist hip-hop and the prototype for the nascent brand of SoundCloud rap that would come to dominate XXL Freshman classes after her own appearance in 2015. When allowed the freedom to create on their own terms, their music has had more vitality and verve than it ever did with million-dollar budgets.

Just look at Iggy Azalea, Kamaiyah, or Tinashe. The arc of her career has been mirrored in recent times by a number of other young women who had enough viral success in the Wild West days of SoundCloud at the start of the streaming era to draw attention from the majors, only to be promptly shelved when the “formulas” that those majors normally apply to female talent turned off those women’s day-one fans. The tragedy is that it’s the sort of album a female performer can only make independent of the major label system. Taking stock of the changes in both Loaf’s image and production style from the original Sell Sole to its sequel, it looks safe to say that Sell Sole II is the album that she always wanted to make. Fortunately, her original style was so prescient that by returning to it on her independently released debut, fittingly titled Sell Sole II, the long-delayed project sounds just as timely and fresh as it did on “Try Me.”

Artists who came along after her adopting her ad-lib-ridden flows flourished as she languished in label limbo. In 2017, the originally proposed release year, the label released a mere handful of confusing singles that buried Dej’s boisterous personality under incongruous, pop-reaching production and guest stars that just didn’t make any sense. Everybody” and The Game’s Tupac-saluting “Ryda.” Dej Loaf seemed poised to take over the world - and then, abruptly, it was like someone pressed “pause” on her career despite all her forward momentum.Īside from one 2015 EP and a “commercial mixtape” that went criminally overlooked in 2016, Columbia Records went nearly four years without giving Dej Loaf a solid release date for her debut album, prompting her to cut ties in 2019.

Her sing-song hooks drove further smashes like the Motor City all-star posse cut “Detroit Vs. Her viral single “Try Me” instantly sparked an intense interest in her tomboy looks and futuristic rhyming style. The pint-size Detroit MC arrived seemingly fully formed in 2014 with her second mixtape, Sell Sole, at the very peak of the “blog rap” craze and the resulting major-label feeding frenzy. We say artists are “ahead of their time” a lot but very rarely is it so applicable as it is to Dej Loaf. Inclusion in this category is the highest distinction we can bestow and signals the most important music being released throughout the year. The RX is Uproxx Music’s stamp of approval for the best albums, songs, and music stories throughout the year.

Dej loaf try me genre