I was having a chill Monday morning until I saw the amazing Rolling Loud clip of Trim belting her new song, “Coconut Water,” with every molecule of her body. She knows she has a hit, and she wants 10,000 sweaty dudes to know it, too. “Coconut Water” starts with those two unexpectedly freaky words, perfectly rapped, potentially ubiquitous, like Future slurring “wicked wicked wicked wicked” and Sexyy Red chanting “Skeeyee!” In Trim’s thick Geechee accent (coca-nut wataa), the words come alive and escape the contours of the waveform. She slightly tweaks how she says it each time, too, leaning a little harder into the wa on the second hook. She sounds a little like early Nicki, a little like Doja Cat, but mostly like she’s from Charleston, South Carolina, where West African languages and grammar brought by enslaved people maintain a strong influence in the area’s Gullah community.
The other reason I think “Coconut Water” is making such an impact is because it sounds like a full-throated reclamation of 2014, when every other song on rap radio had a DJ Mustard tag and one of those unmistakably fat basslines. By the end of that year, we were all tired of hearing slight alterations on the exact same beat—but a decade and change later, maybe we’re starting to crave this kind of sticky, sexy, stripped-back club minimalism again; think “2 On” by Tinashe and Schoolboy Q, or “Loyal” by Chris Brown and Tyga. “Coconut Water” is all about the staccato fairy smacks and the pools of latent energy around them. Things go in cycles, ratchet music included. But when I watch that Rolling Loud clip, I don’t see nostalgia bait; I see a rising regional rap star in a sea of awkward, brain-rotted kids, bringing her local flair to our feeds.
For Trim
APPLE MUSIC – SPOTIFY – SOUNDCLOUD – GENIUS
