BACKSTORY: After dropping her debut album Different Shades of Gloss in 2019, the rapper garnered major attention after her appearance on Hitkidd’s posse cut “Set the Tone” with fellow Memphis emcees GloRilla, K Carbon, Slimeroni, and Aleza
FROM: Memphis, Tennessee
YOU MIGHT KNOW HER FROM: Her verse on “Shabooya,” another Hitkidd posse cut that features many of the same rappers
NOW: Signed to Quality Control Music (home to Migos, Lil Baby, City Girls, Lil Yachty), Gloss Up recently released her Shades of Gloss LP and appeared on GloRilla’s “Wrong One” single
Gloss Up knows what she wants. While working on her recent Shades of Gloss project, the Memphis rapper needed inspiration and knew where to look. “When I go to the studio, if I can’t come up with any ideas, I go on YouTube and I’ll type in ‘Gloss Up–type beats,’” the Quality Control rapper tells me during a call from her dressing room at Smoothie King Center in New Orleans, where she’s preparing to perform as the opening act for Quality Control labelmate Lil Baby’s recently wrapped It’s Only Us tour. “That’s where I find all the hard beats, because they’re the people that are really hungry, the people that don’t got songs with celebrities and stuff. People from my team and I liked this song, so we reached out to the dude and we bought the beat.”
Even though Gloss Up exists in an era when producers regularly send artists plenty of beats to sift through, she prefers doing her own beat digging. “Sometimes I want to ask these [producers], ‘Do you want a hit?’” she says with a decided tinge of disdain. “Because the stuff they send me, I’ll be like, ‘What is this?’ Sometimes I just can’t find any beats from what gets sent to me. But when I go on YouTube, I can type in ‘sad type of beats,’ ‘happy type of beats,’ ‘Mexican type of beats,’ and it’s gonna come right up.”
Selecting the right type of beat is just one way Gloss Up fuels her creative drive. Elsewhere on Shades of Gloss, “Pretty” found its inspiration while the rapper was scrolling social media. “One day I woke up and I was going viral on Twitter,” she says. “[This post about me] had, like, six million views. People were literally [debating whether] I’m pretty or not. So I just wanted to write a song about it.”
“If I can’t come up with any ideas, I go on YouTube and I’ll type in ‘Gloss Up–type beats.’ That’s where I find all the hard beats, because they’re the people that are really hungry.”
Although she’d chosen a pre-existing beat for the track, “Pretty” was still a few steps away from completion. “It’s crazy because I had a writer in the studio with me that night,” she says. “I was telling her that I wanted to write a song about being pretty. So she did what she did, but I had a whole ’nother vibe of what I wanted to do. Sometimes the writer doesn't execute exactly what I’ll be thinking in my head and I’ll be like, ‘I’m gonna stop being lazy, I’m gonna do it.’ That’s how I did ‘Pretty.’”
One of Gloss Up’s favorite ways to explore her musical vision involves incorporating sports into her music videos. She started the trend in 2021 with her “Common Denominator” video, which features her rapping against a “team” fronted by GloRilla, who’s also featured on the track. The pair continued the athletic aesthetic in January 2023 with their “BestFrenn” collaboration, which showcases them rapping and romping in a boxing/wrestling ring, while Gloss teams with Bigg Bagg Queezy on “Don’t Like” which features the two rappers rhyming from the bleachers next to an outdoor basketball court.
“Before we even blew up, that was something we said we was gonna keep doing, putting different sports with our videos,” Gloss Up says of some of her early conversations with GloRilla. “It worked out with the wrestling because we wanted to do something different, too. I didn’t want people to know that that’s what the video was gonna be about, because I like giving them stuff to look at that’s appealing, funny. Plus, all the stuff we put in the videos, I wanted to do,” continues Gloss Up, who adds that she played a variety of sports growing up. “I wanna be a wrestler. That’s something I would like to do if I could.”
Yet as much as she loves sports, the rapper never got into dancing. At first, she and her choreographer weren’t on the same page about her set opening for Lil Baby. “I don’t like twerking and stuff like that,” she says. “That’s what the choreographer had me doing. In the middle of the tour, we had to switch up the whole show.”
“That’s one thing I learned to stand on. If I feel comfortable, I do it. But if I don’t, I don’t have to do it, because this is my craft at the end of the day. This is my business and my job.”
Changing her set brought Gloss Up a sense of peace, clarity, and certainty. “That’s one thing I learned to stand on,” she says. “If I feel comfortable, I do it. But if I don’t, I don’t have to do it, because this is my craft at the end of the day. This is my business and my job.”
This resolve emphasizes the type of strength she details on Shades of Gloss cut “Walk Away,” a dedication to chasing your dreams and not letting others bring you down. “I was not expecting to put that song out,” she says. “I was recording it and sending it to my boyfriend at the time. But I’m glad I got my feelings out there and people get to see that side of me, too. That’s important. I can be in love, too, and my feelings get hurt, too.”
As Gloss Up navigates the music industry, being a single parent, and the evolution of her creative voice, among other things, she knows that whatever happens will likely end up in her next batch of songs. “I’m trying to live right now,” she says. “Like, live and experience stuff so I can have more stuff to write about.” FL
