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She’s traded her signature stream-of-consciousness flow and honeyed-soul vocal stylings for a Midwestern monotone. So when she says that rock is her favorite genre, which she often has, you believe her. In the hands of another artist, A Girl Cried Red might seem like a gimmick, but Princess Nokia’s strongest currency has always been her realness-she’s the kind of performer who’d hop offstage to slap a heckler, the kind of straphanger who wouldn’t think twice about tossing soup at a subway racist, the kind of granddaughter who’d step upstairs to the roof for a smoke break and Instagram Live chat with her fans so as not to bother her Puerto Rican grandfather taking refuge in her apartment post-hurricane. Rather, it’s as if pop-punk and cloud-rap got caught in a flash flood of melancholy and were forced to share an umbrella. Having already covered lo-fi house, trip-hop, disco-soul, Erykah-meets-Lana-Americana, boom-bap-meets-trap, and many points in-between, Princess Nokia has now leaned into the formative sounds of her middle-school years to make an emo mixtape that doesn’t sound like emo or rap or even emo-rap. “And I wanted to write a mixtape that was about falling apart and being a fucking mess.”Įnter A Girl Cried Red, an inchoate but strangely addictive 21 minutes of pure and messy emotions from the shape-shifting New York City rapper born Destiny Frasqueri. “Everybody wants to put on this façade that they all have it together,” Princess Nokia told fans during an Instagram Live chat this past January.