Album Review: A Girl Cried Red [Mixtape] by Princess Nokia

Princess Nokia is known for her versatility as an artist, but this year, she's starting off with her new mixtape, A Girl Cried Red, which straddles a line between emo, alternative and rap. This might come off as a surprise to her new fans, but it's not necessarily a surprise to her die-hard older fans.   If you've been a fan of Princess Nokia before she was even Princess Nokia, you'd know that she went under the name Destiny. Her first release was "Soul Train," a soulful, funky record. With her ability to make other soulful tracks, like ….

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Beyond her undoubted talent, Princess Nokia's greatest strength is her versatility. Predominantly a rapper, currently enjoying a come-up on the back of her breakthrough '1992 Deluxe' album last year, Destiny Frasqueri is also an artist, activist, model, podcaster and icon-in-waiting. Her music shape-shifts too, with the 25-year-old New Yorker shedding numerous aliases while veering freely between Euro-house, straight-up funk and experimental, multilingual noise-rap via her best Lana Del Rey impression.

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"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. "And I wanted to write a mixtape that was about falling apart and being a fucking mess." Enter 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. 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.

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