On her very first EP, Thirst Trap, DonMonique, an unconventional young rapper from Brooklyn, slinks out the gate with two conventional rap album tropes: the voicemail, and the skit. "You's a fake and your man's a clown," she raps on the intro, leveling barbs at an invisible adversary. She recalls the huffy, hedonistic bravura of Lil' Kim—right down to calling your man a bird. "If he with me then you know I make him eat it proper, cuff my hands and show me if you're down to be the poppa, poppa." Wielding Biggie's nickname like punctuation, it's inarguable that she's paying homage to one of her borough's finest.
"Phone Call" resumes the schtick, this time over a beat. It's "Phone Tap" minus the mise en scène: an old school, pre-social media kind of goading. The message is that DonMonique, without being too Joey Bada$$ precious about it, feels like an old school rapper. Stelios Phili, DonMonique's producer, helps further the allusion. Of the seven beats that follow the intro, no less than three invoke the crisp, airy, neck-cracking loops of the late '90s. "UNTLD", in particular, channels Blunted on Reality-era Fugees. Brrrraps waft about the track while guest rappers Remy Banks and Wara duck and weave, playing the Pras and 'Clef to DonMonique's sneering Lauryn. "Jada", the EP's closer, fades out with a clip featuring Jada Pinkett in the classic all-women heist flick, Set It Off. And on "Fifty Kay", over Stelios' brisk drums, guest rapper Noah Caine makes all these '90s fantasies explicit: "Me and Don the new Biggie and Kim."
Danny Brown, who worked through his own formative influences before breaking out to become one of rap's premiere weirdos, cuts enthusiastically in like a Kramer entrance on "Tha Low", which features a honky-tonk piano loop over smoke-thick bass and boom bap drums. His presence energizes what is otherwise a classic street-to-stage come-up story (DonMonique's said that it's inspired by Wu-Tang's "C.R.E.A.M.") "I don't serve no more, bookin' shows off the flows," raps DonMonique. On the next verse Brown mirrors the sentiment by looking back: "Remember when I was thirsty, couldn't even afford the orange juice."
What makes Thirst Trap more than just a series of recycled flows are songs like "ION". It's the most pop-sounding track on the EP, with slithering hi-hats and an Auto-Tuned hook that bears traces of the now. I's good, but not the album's best song. With Thirst Trap, DonMonique makes a case for a certain kind of nostalgia: one that's not about lifting classic cadences and rhyme schemes, or cloyingly idealizing the more noble values of a bygone era. This is not a treatise on real hip-hop. Instead, DonMonique zooms in on the lean, mean rapping that made Brooklyn hot.
