Here’s something you’ve definitely heard before: Atlanta’s rap scene is currently delivering some of the genre’s most flamboyant, charismatic personalities. Here’s something you probably haven’t heard: anyone with the creaky, parrot-like cadence of Bby Kell. She lands somewhere between Glokk40Spaz’s strident gnarl and the old-timey Delta blues twang of a Ma Rainey; her face-scrunching, gut-busting bars get their charm from how gravelly and weathered they sound. That colorful flipbook of adlibs in her back pocket makes the experience even better. “Yeayo!” she repeatedly exclaims on “ILUVYALL,” one of my favorite songs of the year so far. The Beale Street-sampling trunk rattler is bright-eyed and fulgent, full of Kell’s catchy ass one-liners that stick because of her unique drawl. Her brash delivery makes her confidence contagious; I’m liable to yell out “My young nigga, they go stick/Call up Stick/Make a nigga ahh hit the woah!” in her voice at any given moment.
Though there’s a good amount of verve and personality to it, GIRLY POP, Bby Kell’s second tape of 2026, sounds like she’s still finding her footing as an artist. If her SoundCloud catalog is any indication, she really just started releasing music seriously in the past year. So far, her biggest breakthroughs—“2019,” “TERP,” “ILUVYALL”–have been freewheeling, run-and-gun takes on familiar samples from big names (Usher’s “U Don’t Have to Call,” Young Nudy’s “Yeah Yeah”). Her cartoonish riffs on Obama and exotic weed typically work best when the beats sound as lively or ridiculous as she does. GIRLY POP is full of clean, stoner-friendly plugg music, but production-wise, there isn’t much that surpasses the heart-pounding melodies and threshold-punching 808s of her February debut, STRAIGHT POP. The sequencing is jumpy and a bit unseemly, and the songs never express much desire to shift gear from where they start. It’s decent fun if you see it as a sampler of what Kell’s been up to lately,. The spacy tension of Yung Icey’s “I bleed, you bleed,” the brassy lurch of Truebeatzz’s “tailor,” and the woozy eccentricity of Whyceg’s “blown my hi” all feel plucked from one big Untitled folder.
Not long after GIRLY POP dropped, I sent standout track “rickyo” to my homie, who responded by saying she raps like she grew up in a house full of brothers. It was the way she hit the “Coquina clutch like Samoa Joe” over vibey theremins and pitter-pattering drums that sparked the theory, and I see where he’s coming from. GIRLY POP is full of headstrong flexes and the kind of slimeball vignettes you’d hear on a Gucci Mane tape: Magic City trips and loaded bazookas, widebody kits with bales in the trunk. With that comes no shortage of humor, delivered like somebody’s drunk granny talking shit on the porch. “Not talkin’ to hoes, stuff a dick in yo’ mouth,” she retorts on “1st part.” Her distinct personality is really her X-factor, and despite how every twist and contour in her tone begets a sense of goofiness, I can only imagine Bby Kell being deadass serious. “He get off them Percs, I’m startin’ to worry/I think he said, ‘I love you,’” she raps on “small ball,” and I can picture her waving some guy off as she says it.
It really feels like growing up in Atlanta makes people genetically predisposed to the slippery, serpentine flows you hear from Bby Kell. She’s calm and rhythmically straight-laced on tracks like “rickyo” and “honeycomb,” locking in on muddy, metronomic pockets that showcase a newfound poise—almost as if she’s subduing her idiosyncrasies for the sake of something more neatly packaged. If Kell’s debut EP was the balls-to-the-wall problem child, GIRLY POP feels like her overly laidback big sister, equipped with more tools and experience, and ultimately less prone to risk-taking. Her signature looseness is still present (peep the zig-zagging warbles of “baby K”), but her most off-kilter quirks could surely be fleshed out over songs that are more dynamic, more challenging, and more unpredictable. After all, I can’t think of anyone who can do what she does with her voice.
