Karrahbooo released her long-delayed debut mixtape, Not Da 2, speaking to Rolling Stone the day before it dropped about the two-year silence that preceded it. The Atlanta-born MC, who got her start as Lil Yachty's personal assistant before becoming one of the more recognizable new faces in hip-hop, said the project arrives after being stuck without the ability to release music due to complications tied to her deal with Concrete Boys, the collective Yachty founded.
"It feels kind of exciting and nerve-wracking," she said 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."
Karrahbooo broke out with 2022's "Money Counter," followed by "40" and "Running Late," before her On the Radar freestyle introduced her to a wider audience. She went on to tour with Latto, Mariah the Scientist, and Key Glock, and played Coachella and Rolling Loud. Then came her 2024 falling out with Yachty and Concrete Boys, a personal dispute between the longtime friends that spilled into public gossip. "I only dropped four songs before that whole thing happened," she said. "Then I couldn't drop at all for two years. So I just feel like people don't know what to think of me."
She said many people don't realize she was under a deal with Yachty that kept her from releasing music, adding, "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 that he was holding up her music.
Karrahbooo says she is now fully out of that deal and signed to Mercury Records, releasing music through her own NotTheTwo LLC in partnership with Mercury Records/Republic. "He's just my friend," she said of Yachty. "He's just there to support me. He's not my boss anymore."
The reconciliation began earlier this year when Yachty posted an old photo of her on his private Instagram account. She commented asking if he missed her, then FaceTimed him while with a friend. "I was like, 'You miss me, bro?'" she recalled. "And then he was like, 'Yeah.' And then we had this long talk just about everything that happened, and we just patched it up." That reconciliation is reflected in the Not Da 2 track "Patched It Up," which features Yachty, and the two have since recorded an episode of his A Safe Place podcast. She noted lingering frustration over past claims that he wrote her material: "You know what bothers me so much? He wrote a verse for me on his song. It's just like … he didn't write my songs."
Karrahbooo admitted she didn't always handle the dispute well, staying quiet for months before eventually engaging online. "I just couldn't take it anymore," she said. "I just started crashing out. I don't think I handled it very well, but I learned from it." She added, "I just feel like you shouldn't beef with anybody online. 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 was recorded during the two years she couldn't release music, and she said the emotion of that period comes through. "I was just angry and hurt a lot of the times," she said. "So I kind of sound angry. But I'm nice. I'm not that angry." Working with producer Truebeatzz, she pushed toward harder, more animated beats and away from the muted, Detroit-influenced sound of her earliest work, recalling that she asked him, "Why don't you ever give me the beats that the hood niggas do or the trap niggas do? Why you never give me no turnt shit? Let me try that."
A former DJ, Karrahbooo said her tastes run wider than her records suggest, shaped by exposure to "old white music," Black music, and Caribbean records from her Jamaican mother's side after her parents separated. These days, she said, she listens to R&B and alternative music more than rap, an influence reflected on Not Da 2's "Understand Me," made with producer Noah Breakfast. For her eventual debut album, she hopes to work with Ghanaian American singer Moliy and, especially, producer Laila!
"I feel like I never got really a chance," she said, adding she hopes listeners can now form opinions based on her actual output. "I hope people see that I don't need anybody. I could do it myself, and I did."
Photo: EliTheNut, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
