Tierra Whack has released a pair of new songs, “Peppers and Onions” and “Feel Good.”
“Peppers and Onions” boasts a playful beat centered around whistling, the percussive but melodic click of a tongue against the roof of a mouth, and some booming bass hits to hold down the low end. Whack’s versatile vocal performance perfectly matches the production, although her lyrics grapple earnestly with the pressures of fame and human fallibility: “I don’t wanna be judged, I just wanna be me,” she raps, “Even though we buy chains, we just wanna be free.”
“Feel Good,” meanwhile, is a much shorter and pensive track that finds Whack searching for joy amid a distant piano and soft synth plinks: “I got everybody looking at me/Like why she don’t feel good?” Whack wonders, “I done seen the stars, I done seen the lights/But I can’t forget that I’m still hood.”
“Peppers and Onions” and “Feel Good” arrive on the heels of “Dora,” which Whack released at the end of October and marked her first proper solo single of the year (although back in March she did release a quarantine song, “Stuck,” set to Alanis Morissette’s “Ironic”). Whack’s debut album, Whack World, was released in 2018, while last year she shared a string of one-off singles.
From Rolling Stone US