Four tracks into her new mixtape Alligator Bites Never Heal, Doechii is gasping for air. Don’t get it twisted: The 26-year-old rapper isn’t short on lung power. But after five years in the music industry—a period in which she signed to Kendrick Lamar’s former label Top Dawg Entertainment, earned a coveted spot in the 2022 XXL Freshman Class, and charted a platinum single with the R&B-focused “What It Is (Block Boy)”—Doechii yearned for the kind of breather that up-and-comers typically aren’t advised to take. In the final bars of “Denial Is a River,” a candid conversation with a therapist alter ego, Doechii illustrates the consequences of life in the fast lane: Her therapist suggests a breathing exercise, and Doechii hyperventilates rhythmically, flailing in the space between a scribble scratch and a panic attack.
Alligator Bites Never Heal fits Doechii like an oxygen mask. On her most ambitious and musically diverse project to date—19 tracks that feel more sensitive and self-possessed than her recent spate of club-ready singles—she makes room for vulnerability. It’s a formidable full-length debut, fluid yet focused, that reprises her playful and melodic sides without skimping on hard-hitting hip-hop.
Doechii splashed onto the scene with the 2020 EP Oh the Places You’ll Go, a seven-song collection more or less defined by the cutesy viral hit “Yucky Blucky Fruitcake.” she / her / black bitch, her 2022 debut EP for TDE, marked a definitive turn away from the bubbly aesthetic; on subsequent singles, Doechii pushed into harder and faster territory, embracing Rico Nasty’s punk sensibilities on “Pacer” and experimenting with house music on “Alter Ego.” She’s a capable chameleon, but the searching specificity of her early tracks has been MIA. As Doechii put it on recent single “MPH”: “I could give them the conscious shit, but I’m too busy giving them cunt.”
Alligator Bites Never Heal is all about processing not posturing. Doechii raps with sober-minded confidence, acknowledging “lost friends, shed just like loose skin” and the pressures of label expectations and impostor syndrome. On opening track “Stanka Pooh,” she cycles through intrusive thoughts: “What if I choke on this Slurpee? What if I make it big? What if my car exploded while I’m casually pumping the gas and smoking a cig?” Just when it’s getting serious, she tempers the weight with a cutting couplet: “And if those the only fears that I’ll take to my grave/I’m pissing on you hoes living or dead.” That’s Doechii at her nuanced best—anxious, funny, pissing on hoes.
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