Who knows what this album would’ve sounded like if Flo Milli hadn’t posted that TikTok last September, fanning out a stack of bills in a sparsely appointed condo, grills glinting as she rapped: “He speed in the Wraith while his hand on my coochie/He touching Emilio Pucci.”
Flo had already released one single, “Fruit Loop,” with another, “Chocolate Rain,” set to drop that week. Those two songs, along with the October single “BGC,” were produced by the up-and-coming Young Fyre, who had previously co-produced Flo’s vindictively bratty bop “Conceited.” According to an interview with Rolling Stone last year, Fyre produced at least 10 tracks for Flo’s “vulnerable” follow-up to 2022’s You Still Here, Ho?
None of those songs appear on Fine Ho, Stay. It’s easy to imagine how the viral success of “Never Lose Me” might have upended the Alabama rapper’s rollout—picture a mid-level label manager breathlessly recounting the metrics to her team, previously closed budgets suddenly reopening. Fine Ho, Stay is accordingly expensive, laced with beats by established hitmakers like Bangladesh, ATL Jacob, and Lex Luger, and offers some of Flo’s best songs yet. It’s a worthy closer to the trilogy set off by 2020’s Ho, why is you here ?, but it’s hard to shake the sensation that Flo Milli can make a better album than this.
That’s mostly thanks to Flo Milli herself, whose nimble flows curl anodyne ideas into pleasingly irregular shapes. On “Edible,” a particularly gifted lover doesn’t make Flo feel perfect or flawless, but “impeccable”; the strobing start-stop of “Tell Me What You Want” will likely leave you muttering “Men like to talk and I hate it” for weeks. Her syncopated flows handspring and pitter-patter towards vivid phrases and sticky earworms, as on the double-dutch trap anthem “Got the Juice,” where Flo alternates hot and cold: “I’m so confusing, he can’t tell if I’m in love or if I’m using/I just lost my eater damn, let’s get to recruiting.”
Speaking of eaters, Fine Ho, Stay is almost exclusively focused on sexual competition. Milli still flexes the karats in her watch and a minor caravan of luxury vehicles, but she’s more concerned with her harem, in particular the assets they offer—cash, comfort, cunnilingus. On “Neva,” Flo makes “a rich nigga go broke”; on “New Me,” she sizes up the guy’s whole friend group to make sure she fucks the hottest one. The hoes bear few to no distinguishing traits, a cast of NPCs who exist solely to confirm the intensity of Milli’s sex appeal.
These nondescript liaisons begin to blur together as the album wears on. Flo has described her raps as “playful nursery rhymes,” but the immediacy of her straightforward approach loses its charm in repetition, particularly compared to her contemporaries. Where Glorilla might “stomp a lil pussy ho with some shell toes” and Sexyy Red flexes the “thong all up in my bootyhole,” Flo Milli’s threats and sexcapades feel perfunctory. Although musically she’s closer to Megan Thee Stallion, Flo’s frisky phrasing recalls the radio-friendly sex talk of Ariana Grande on “positions.”
You can also see hints of Grande in the album’s hedonistic approach to gender relations. Milli doesn’t need these men (except when she’s lonely) and she’s 100 percent for the girls (until she wants your man). These mild hypocrisies mark plenty of rap albums—Playboi Carti and Drake both bounce between a tough exterior and the occasional admission of weakness—but Flo Milli comes off more muddled than multifaceted. As good as the minor-key shuffle of “Neva” gets, Milli undercuts her hook (“Never in my life will I change the way I am”) before the end of the first verse, rapping, “Back then I was hungry but I changed when the mils came.” And this hook about never switching up comes just two songs after “New Me,” where an ex-flame “say he fucked the old bitch this a new me.”
These incongruities might be tolerable if it weren’t for the album’s syrupy lovergirl moments. Harmonious “Can’t Stay Mad” makes for well-executed Sweetener karaoke, but it’s not as fun as hearing Milli smirk, “Know I’m conceited/I had to block a nigga for a reason” on plugg-y standout “Toast” a track earlier. Worst of all is the saccharine “Lay Up,” which funnels 2014-era Nicki Minaj balladry through a bed of whirring synths. “This the real me,” Flo intones at the start. Cool, but who have we been listening to for the last eight songs?
Flo Milli clearly has her own experiences to draw from, even if she prefers not to bare her soul. “Life Hack” strikes a balance between genuine tenderness and pragmatic stoicism—you believe that Flo genuinely regrets leaving this man and that she won’t let him play in her face. Closing track “Not Sorry” is less forlorn, but still packs an emotional wallop thanks to Flo’s fastidious detailing of a floundering relationship. Dating in your early 20s is chaotic and contradictory, but the idiosyncrasies of these songs feel more lived-in than either “Lay Up” or “Can’t Stay Mad.”
The untidiness of Fine Ho, Stay suggests a fundamental uncertainty about the leading lady at its center. Actually, it’s worse than that. Fine Ho, Stay suggests that even a hyper-charismatic star with an established fanbase and a bona fide smash isn’t immune to label meddling. Naturally, the nucleus of the album is “Never Lose Me,” refreshed with a pair of excellent verses by SZA and Cardi B. Both are in rare form, SZA mirroring the construction of Flo’s hook and Cardi rattling off hilarious one-liners (“I got a round ass, I don’t think the Earth flat”). Too bad Flo Milli’s practically nowhere to be found: Her viral verses are truncated to a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it four bars. It’s an egregious misstep that betrays an inexplicable lack of faith in the artist who made the song in the first place—a coronation with no heir in sight.
