Karrahbooo says she hasn’t felt like her life has changed very much over the two years since her last project with Concrete Boys, the collective founded by Lil Yachty. She says she’s been sitting on new music, unable to release it thanks to label complications.
Apart from a few times experimenting with live streaming (“It’s just really harder than it looks. You have to be entertaining, and I’m more chill,” she says), she’s been pretty much stuck in place. “I would say it’s only been stagnant because — wait, is that the right word?” she says, interrupting herself. “I would say it was only not changing so much because I wasn’t able to drop, so I really was stuck a little bit.”
Karrahbooo spoke to Rolling Stone the day before she released her long-delayed “debut” mixtape, Not Da 2, a refreshing and invigorating set of tracks that manage to make up for the years of relative quiet. “It feels kind of exciting and nerve-wracking,” she says over Zoom. “It feels relieving too, because I couldn’t drop for so long. Now, that I finally can, I don’t really know how to feel. I feel so many ways.”
Despite this technically being her debut, Karrahbooo is arguably one of the more recognizable new faces in hip-hop. The Atlanta-born MC, who got her start as Lil Yachty’s personal assistant, made waves with 2022’s “Money Counter,” a breezy and melodic bop that sounds like it almost came too easily. Karrahbooo’s flow, kind of like Veeze or Lucki, manages to feel both laid-back and conversational and deeply and intricately rhythmic, an enchanting combination made more potent by her almost dance-leaning sense of melody.
She followed up with “40” and “Running Late,” before her On the Radar freestyle would introduce her soft-spoken, endlessly clever and menacing cadence to the masses, turning Lil Yachty’s Concrete label into a venerable force within rap. For a while, it was all moving according to plan. She toured with Latto, Mariah the Scientist, and Key Glock. She played Coachella and Rolling Loud. And then, it all stopped.
“I only dropped four songs before that whole thing happened,” she says. “Then I couldn’t drop at all for two years. So I just feel like people don’t know what to think of me.”
“That whole thing,” of course, is her falling out with Yachty and the Concrete Boys in 2024. A personal dispute between her and Yachty, who have been longtime friends, quickly became internet-gossip fodder.
To hear Karrahbooo tell it now, one of the most lasting misconceptions is also one of the simplest. People saw the music stop after Concrete Boys and assumed she had run out of ideas.
“For some reason, a lot of people don’t know I was in a deal with Yachty,” she says. “We got into it, and I was just stuck in the deal for a very long time and I couldn’t release music. People just thought I wasn’t dropping because I couldn’t do it without him. But I was already doing it without him before he even got in the picture.” (Yachty has previously disputed claims he was holding up Karrahbooo’s music.)
Karrahbooo says she is now fully out of that deal and signed to Mercury Records. Her recent releases have appeared through her own NotTheTwo LLC, in partnership with Mercury Records/Republic. “He’s just my friend,” she says of Yachty now. “He’s just there to support me. He’s not my boss anymore.”
Getting from one status to the other turned out to be considerably less dramatic than their falling out. Earlier this year, Yachty posted an old picture of Karrahbooo on his private Instagram account. She saw it and commented something along the lines of “What, do you miss me?”
Karrahbooo was with a friend when she FaceTimed him. “I was like, ‘You miss me, bro?’” she remembers. “And then he was like, ‘Yeah.’ And then we had this long talk just about everything that happened, and we just patched it up.”
The reconciliation has even made its way onto Not Da 2, where Yachty appears on a song appropriately titled “Patched It Up.” Karrahbooo says the two have also recently recorded an episode of Yachty’s A Safe Place podcast, where the subject of his old accusations that he was behind all of her music came up again.
“You know what bothers me so much?” she says. “He wrote a verse for me on his song. It’s just like … he didn’t write my songs.”
She admits she herself did not always handle that period particularly well. For the first few months, she stayed quiet, hoping to keep the dispute offline. Eventually, she says, the constant comments and competing narratives got to her. “I just couldn’t take it anymore,” she says. “I just started crashing out. I don’t think I handled it very well, but I learned from it.”
The lesson?
“I just feel like you shouldn’t beef with anybody online,” she says. “You have each other’s number. I feel like you could talk it out. I feel like I should put business over emotions.”
About 90 percent of Not Da 2, she says, was recorded during the two years when she was unable to release it. Much of it captures a version of Karrahbooo who was watching her career sit still while the conversation around her continued without her.
“I was just angry and hurt a lot of the times,” she says. “So I kind of sound angry. But I’m nice. I’m not that angry.”
You can hear some of that restlessness in the production. Working with Truebeatzz, Karrahbooo deliberately began moving away from some of the muted, Detroit-influenced production that accompanied her earliest music and toward harder, more animated beats.
She remembers asking Truebeatzz why he kept sending her what he thought a Karrahbooo beat was supposed to sound like. “Why don’t you ever give me the beats that the hood niggas do or the trap niggas do?” she asked. “Why you never give me no turnt shit? Let me try that.”
Still, the harder sound of Not Da 2 may already be temporary. Karrahbooo spent years as a DJ before becoming a rapper, and her listening habits stretch further than her own records suggest. Her parents separated when she was young, and she says moving between different branches of her family exposed her to “old white music,” Black music, and the Caribbean records on her Jamaican mother’s side. These days, she says, she probably listens to R&B and alternative music more than rap.
On Not Da 2, she experiments with that palette on “Understand Me,” working with producer Noah Breakfast on something closer to the hazy alternative music she likes. Her ambitions for her eventual debut album go even further. She talks enthusiastically about working with Ghanaian American singer Moliy and, especially, Laila!, whose idiosyncratic production she hopes will play a major role in the record.
“My mixtape, OK, it’s good,” she says. “But I want my album to be great.”
For all the drama attached to the last chapter of her career, Karrahbooo doesn’t sound interested in turning Not Da 2 into a referendum on her merit as a rapper. What she’s really interested in is finally getting enough music out for listeners to have an opinion about Karrahbooo that is based on her actual output. “I feel like I never got really a chance,” she says. She thinks that may be about to change.
“I hope people see that I don’t need anybody,” she says. “I could do it myself, and I did.”
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