As a news editor that normally covers symposiums, grants and Student Senate shenanigans, taking a Doja Cat album review article was certainly a step into the dark for me. So too was Doja Cat herself — while I enjoy many genres of music, I have never properly given Doja a listen nor could name a single song of hers.
After listening to Spotify’s “This is Doja Cat” playlist to familiarize myself with her work, I was left, frankly, unimpressed. Most of her top hits seemed to fall in this odd gray area between rap and club music that lacks what makes either genre unique. Her repetitive, chorus-based songs lack the lyrical substance of good rap music and the lax tempo on most of her songs makes her music far too low-energy to be great party music.
Granted, there are exceptions: she spits bars in her 2022 single “Vegas” and her 2020 single “Boss Bitch” is a certified club banger, but most of her music just feels meaningless and over-commercialized; making me wonder how some of these songs have over 1.5 billion streams.
Listening to Doja’s new album, “Scarlet,” gave me a completely new appreciation of Doja’s work by featuring sounds and influences unlike any Doja Cat work before.
Doja begins the album by republishing her 2023 singles “Paint The Town Red” and “Demons”. While “Paint The Town Red” already has over 337 million streams on Spotify alone, the song felt repetitive and I was honestly bored of it by the second chorus. “Demons” brought far more energy but still lacked any substantive lyrics.
Following the two singles is “Wet V*gina”, Doja’s attempt at a “WAP”-style girlboss anthem. While the song has great energy, it is quite repetitive and may not be catchy or interesting enough to become a hit.
The following six tracks, “Fck the Girls”, “Ouchies”, “97”, “Gun”, “Go Off” and “Shutcho”, are frankly forgettable. “Fck The Girls” is catchy, “Ouchies” plays with interesting reggaetón synth and steel drum sounds and “97” has a great flow during the verses. However, they all just feel like incredibly mediocre, commercialized pop-rap songs that are barely ample to be picked up by radio stations and official playlists but not special enough to make them worth listening to.
Following 16 minutes and 15 seconds of completely wasted time is “Agora Hills”, a catchy love song that will likely be the album’s main hit, having already amassed 20 million streams at the time of publication.
The seven songs that follow “Agora Hills” make a complete turn from the sound of the first half of the album and feature a side of Doja that she rarely shows. Dropping the cheaply-produced commercial pop backing tracks for an R&B sound, Doja adds an incredible amount of depth to her music and gives me an appreciation of Doja as a musician that all her prior work had failed to earn.
“Can’t Wait” is likely my favorite song by Doja Cat. This rap love ballad has genuinely deep, introspective lyrics and R&B flow that sounds like a beautiful combination of 2Pac’s “Dear Mama” and J. Cole’s “4 Your Eyez Only” album. I kid you not when I write that I listened to this song about four times on repeat before taking notes as I genuinely loved the groove that listening to this song got me in. If this sound, which Doja digs further into for the rest of the album, is her new style, consider me a Doja Cat fan.
Following “Can’t Wait” is “Often”, a psychedelic sounding pop song that reminded me of the likes of Unknown Mortal Orchestra.
“Love Life” fully embraces an R&B style, with a sort of Bryson Tiller-style flow and backing track and creative, illustrious lyrics. This song, along with “Can’t Wait”, genuinely made it onto some of my playlists while I almost stopped listening to the album after “Go Off”. I’m honestly disappointed that the music industry is so rigged toward the over-commercialized pop sound that Doja had to release half an album of trash to show off her real talents as a musician with this side of her album.
“Skull And Bones” continues with the same energy, with an R&B bass over a trap beat and catchy flow continuing to draw clear inspiration from “4 Your Eyez Only”.
A republication of Doja’s 2023 single “Attention” once again taps into the psychedelic sound that Doja tapped into in “Often”, featuring a beautiful, arpeggiated classical guitar, sitar and harps throughout the song.
Second-to-last on deck is “Balut”, a phenomenal rap song with a flow and backing track that harkens back to a 90’s New York sound that the Wu-Tang Clan made famous. This track was absolutely one of my favorites from the album.
Doja ends with “WYM Freestyle”, which, if actually a freestyle, is quite impressive. This high energy song is a perfect end to a rollercoaster of an album that cements her place in the world of rap.
Is the album good enough for me to buy tickets to see Doja alongside Ice Spice and Doechii on her upcoming Scarlet Tour? Probably not (unless anyone has a spare ticket to her Dec. 2 Boston concert), but her harken back to her musical roots in the second half of the album absolutely makes it worth a listen.