For Miami, Florida duo City Girls, pain and fortune often live in tandem. Yung Miami has balanced becoming both a rap star and a mother of two while separated from collaborator JT, whose recent federal incarceration for credit card fraud highlighted the prison industrial complex that disproportionately affects Black women. The pair have overcome an unfair share of adversity, challenges that represent systematic factors many of us confront while working hard for our dreams and the space to thrive, raise families, and celebrate. So for City Girls, who were finally reunited last fall, the premature leak of their new album City on Lock—much of it recorded from separate states—was especially devastating. But throughout the 15 tracks, Yung Miami and JT come through with their signature amped-up party jams, while also making space to acknowledge what they’ve survived. It’s a dynamic informed by their time apart during a trying period that required confidence and ambition to conquer.
The appeal of City Girls’ music is the duo’s ability to turn up, take up space, and demand the crème da la crème, despite life’s hardships. City on Lock underscores their humor and their money-making mission, but it’s also tempered with reflection. Yung Miami is first up on the punchy double-track album opener “Enough/Better.” She sets the in-your-face energy at the top of her verse: “Enough is enough, bitch/City Girls with the fuck shit,” she snaps. It’s a familiar City Girls mood, one that reminds their foes that she and her crew are prepared to defend themselves. “Don’t make me put my wig in a rubber band!” Yung Miami warns in a jokey ad-lib. Halfway through, the track segues into the breezy “Better,” allowing City Girls to let us in on their vulnerability. “I’m fightin’ loss, fightin’ demons and anxiety/I really used to sleep on pallets/Now I’m sittin’ in the condo like it’s a palace,” JT raps. Yung Miami reflects with the same self-acknowledgment as she recalls losing JT and her mother to the prison system and surviving a shooting at seven months pregnant—all while becoming world-famous. City Girls have always made the kind of music that might support you in dancing through your issues, but seeing the pair make room to talk about their own adds dimension.
On “Jobs,” they make their status clear and revel in the fruits of their labor. “I don’t work jobs/Bitch I am a job,” City Girls say in the hook. Miami in particular shines on the Southside-produced anthem “Pussy Talk,” featuring Doja Cat. She sets the energy of the song with a snooty tone as she rants in the chorus, “Don’t nothin’ but this cash make this pussy talk/Don’t nothin’ but a bag make this pussy talk.” Both anthems are laced with free game on how to receive pleasure and gifts from men willing to ante up.
The friendship between Yung Miami and JT remains the most special component of City Girls. “I go so hard for my sister til the end we came from nothin man,” JT wrote on Twitter last week. It’s a natural synergy that spills out into the enthusiasm of their music. Fully in sync over the chest-shaking bass of Twsyted Genius production on “That’s My Bitch,” City Girls are playful while crushing their time on the mic. “Pretty bitch, plenty racks in the Chanel bag/Yung Miami keep the Glock if you act bad/Pussy juice drippin’ on a nigga durag,” JT brags. They’ve witnessed one another’s laborious come-up and they’re here to cheer each other on.
City on Lock closes with the short and sobering “Ain’t Say Nothin.” As at the start of the album, City Girls go deeper into the traumas they’ve overcome. JT raps about being left by her mother and raised by her father: “Middle finger to my daddy/Why a sucker had to fuck my mammy/Left us and he traumatized us badly/Created him, a savage/Hustle hard just to get cabbage/’Cause growin’ up, a bitch never had it.” At just over a minute, the song feels a bit incomplete, fading out just as they open up: “I get it out the muscle/Nigga, you ain’t sayin’ nothin’/I’m a grown-ass woman/I ain’t a stranger to the struggle.” City Girls have endured tribulations and amassed an abundance they’d always wanted, an underappreciated and compelling piece of their narrative. Though Yung Miami and JT end with a somber look back, City on Lock is also a testament to their blessings.
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