When Doechii first broke through, in the slipstream of 2020’s autobiographical single Yucky Blucky Fruitcake, she already felt like a fully realised artist – with a clarity to her vision that most usually spend years honing in on.
“I’m meant to blow up, like the white things and soda rockets,” she rapped, prophetically, on a track that traced her journey from class chatterbox who sang karaoke to Paramore behind closed doors, to a star-in-waiting hungry to hit the big time.
No wonder that Top Dawg Entertainment – the label credited with signing Kendrick Lamar as he rose to stardom, and home to the likes of Schoolboy Q and SZA – snapped her straight up off the back of that huge early promise.
Early hits, like the cool, self-assured, house-inflected Persuasive, and the frenetic Crazy – with its snake-filled music video – only built on that huge potential, and this year’s debut mixtape Alligator Bites Never Heal is one of the finest rap outings of the year.
“It means surviving f***ed shit,” she said, explaining the project’s title on stage at Islington Assembly Hall. “It means celebrating a sold out tour. Not following a formula, and not letting the industry define you.”
Four years on from her breakthrough this was, perhaps remarkably, Doechii’s debut London show. The Tampa rapper brought an amusingly questionable stab at a British accent, crowd participation (in the shape of an audience member who effortlessly death-dropped on stage) and the swampy, tropical fronds of her home state Florida, along for the ride.
Both her London shows sold out within minutes.
On her mixtape’s stand-out Denial is a River, Doechii laid bare just a few of the reasons why Londoners have waited so long for last night, racing through relationship fall-out and creative differences with her label with razor-sharp wit. “Wrist watch, drip drop, labels want the TikToks, now I'm makin' TikTok music, what the f**k? I need a cleanse, need a detox, but we ain't got time to stop, the charts need us,” she rapped.
Though Doechii first took to the stage dressed like a slick working professional, complete with a sharp blazer and glasses, her smart jacket was soon flung aside. By the time Alter Ego, viral hit What It Is, and mixtape standout NISSAN ALTIMA rolled around – bolstered by the instinctive chemistry between Doechii and her onstage DJ Miss Milan – the room was eating out the palm of her hand.
“You can do any f**king thing you set your mind to,” she said, ahead of taking requests for her closing song. The room unanimously voted in favour of the track that kickstarted everything: Yucky Blucky Fruitcake.
“Don’t let anybody in your life convince you that you are too much, too dramatic… to get to where you want to go,” she said, urging the venue to scream out every last drop of angst left in them. Right to the back, the entire room gladly rose to the occasion; the ideal seal of approval for an artist who has known what heights she was setting out to reach, and exactly how to get there, right from day one.
