But the purpose of 'A Girl Cried Red' shouldn't be misconstrued. It would be easy enough to assume that a rap project that flirts with the disparate style of emo-rock would be in the same vein as backpacker-friendly artists like Sage Francis or Grieves. Nokia's touchstones are more on the nose: think Avril Lavigne set to atmospheric trap.
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New York rapper own Destiny Frasqueri, better known as Princess Nokia, has been making waves in the local scene for a few years now. In 2016, she broke out in a big way with her 1992 mixtape, and her star continued to rise last year with 1992 Deluxe, an expanded re-release that also served as her official debut album. Today, she’s following that up with another mixtape, A Girl Cried Red.
Rappers like Lil Uzi Vert have been bringing emo into the hip-hop sphere recently, and Princess Nokia is a big emo fan — an episode of her new Beats 1 radio show, Voices In My Head, was dedicated exclusively to emo and pop-punk. So perhaps it shouldn’t come as a surprise that she describes A Girl Cried Red as an “emo mixtape,” and in a recent interview with Dazed, she expanded upon the inspiration behind the title.
“Blood, like a girl cried blood,” she explained. “It’s taken from my favorite song, ‘The Robot with Human Hair.’ I have a lot of references from this Dance Gavin Dance album, and the first line in the song is ‘Your eyes are bleeding.’ I always loved that image, and it’s a big motif in my work. The mixtape name is supposed to mean a girl cried blood, or a girl cried fury. There’s so many interpretations of what red is.”
Fittingly, the lead single from the mixtape is called “Your Eyes Are Bleeding,” and it really does sound like an amalgam of modern rap and mid-’00s emo. It comes along with a video directed by Milah Libin that features footage from the past two years of live shows in support of 1992 Deluxe, and you can watch that and stream the whole mixtape below.
TOUR DATES:
04/15 Indio, CA @ Coachella Festival 04/20 San Francisco, CA @ 1015 Folsom 04/22 Indio, CA @ Coachella Festival 04/29 Chicago, IL @ The Metro 05/05 Brooklyn, NY @ Elsewhere 05/06 Brooklyn, NY @ Elsewhere 05/12 Miami, FL @ Rolling Loud Festival 05/25 Barcelona, Spain @ Secret Location TBA 05/26 Madrid, Spain @ Tomavistas Festival 05/27 A Coruna, Spain @ Inn Club 05/31 Athens, Greece @ Piraeus 117 Academy 06/01 Copenhagen, Denmark @ Distortion Festival 06/02 London, UK @ Field Day Festival 06/16 Richmond, CA @ FEELS 6 @ Craneway Pavillion 07/07 Turku, Finland @ Ruisrock 07/08 Zamárdi, Hungary @ Balaton Sound Festival 07/13 Dublin, Ireland @ Longitude Festival 07/14 Dour, Belguim @ Dour Festival 07/15 Berlin, Germany @ MELT Festival 07/19 Benicassim, Spain @ Benicassim Festival 07/20 Lisbon Portugal @ Super Bock 07/21 Seyðisfjörður, Iceland @ LungA Art Festival 08/18 Hamburg, Germany @ Dockville Festival 08/20 London, UK @ O2 Forum 08/21 Leeds, UK @ Belgrave Music Hall
A Girl Cried Red is out now via Rough Trade.
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Rough Trade RecordsThe prevalence of emo in rap has been one of hip-hop’s most intriguing developments. Rappers have always explored their emotion, but rarely has hip-hop accepted artists who forfeit the mirage of machismo to openly wade in their bleak outlooks on the world.Lil Peep and Lil Uzi Vert are some of the prominent young artists who have markedly fused the emo alternative rock scene with hip-hop. Tragically of an overdose in 2017. Even without his physical presence, the lane he helped carve out is intact and has most recently been explored by the ever-versatile Princess Nokia on A Girl Cried Red.Princess Nokia, born Destiny Fraqsueri and formerly known as Wavy Spice, is a master of dynamism. As a child of the internet age, she’s able to mirror her influences and seemingly morph into myriad artistic movements, whether it’s 70s-inspired funk on Honeysuckle or futuristic electronic on Metallic Butterfly. The constant efficacy of the projects hints that she’s not merely inspired, but adept at accentuating different aspects of her temperament.She succeeds at doing that again on A Girl Cried Red, a moody 8-track mixtape that.
The mixtape doesn’t solely exist in gloomy soundscapes, presenting a sonic balance. There’s upbeat production such as “Flowers And Rope” and “Look Up Kid” being pulled back down to earth by the pensive gravitas of “Little Angel” and “Your Eyes Are Bleeding.”.
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March 2023
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