Trying to break as an artist in 2026 requires perpetually auditioning for the vertical video algorithm, which rewards the weirdest first impression. In rap and some other genres, this has boosted a specific kind of hook, which fans now call a “vocal stim.” Borrowing its questionable name from the self-stimulatory behaviors some people do to regulate their emotions, the term refers to a short sound or phrase that’s such an earworm, in such an unexpected way, that listeners find themselves repeating it, contextless, while driving to work, taking a shower, or perusing shelves at the grocery store (“co-co-coconut water”).
Viral Sacramento rapper Faith Leazae’s new 16-minute EP Faith is a relentless onslaught of “vocal stims” that doubles as a relentless promotional pitch for Faith and her personality. She’s constantly uptalking, voice-cracking, minting potential catchphrases, manifesting success, and connecting dots you didn’t know could be connected. Her best and biggest song, “Gimme a Gas Station?,” is about how she wants a gas station at her house so she can avoid being bothered by guys at the pump. At least initially. Mostly it’s about getting to say stuff like “Gee willickers,” get a big balloon for the music video that says “Gee willickers,” and invent enough word-associations involving the word “gas” that the only appropriate response from fans is to spam the ⛽ emoji.
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Maybe you’re weary of increasingly short gimmick-burst song structures or aren’t typically moved by the kind of performer who invites people to comment “I love whatever is wrong with you” on her videos. (I first learned about Faith Leazae from Reels where she raps everything a cappella, sometimes to random passersby, to maximize awkwardness.) But her music is so over-the-top, committed to its outlandish turns, and genuinely fun that it’s hard not to connect with it, even if you’re otherwise pessimistic about the hoops artists have to jump through to find audiences nowadays. “Gimme a Break?” has a funny moment where Faith tells off a man trying to oversell himself by calling him a “couch surfer” who’s “going from couch-to-couch doing the bouncy-bounce,” then preemptively fends off any classism allegations by clarifying that she supports any of her own fans staying on couches. Also, the chorus (“I’m-yay at-thay itch-bay”) is in Pig Latin, so she made a video touring a pig farm. (🐷🐷🐷.)
All of Faith’s zany choices work toward the actual music, outside the narrow context of the artist-as-influencer. The EP collects, in chronological order, all eight of the songs she’s dropped since she started rapping seriously about a year ago. You hear her gradually hone her writing and vocal presence to better express her unique sense of humor, eventually jumping between yelps and whispers and compressing conversational sentences into one breath in the tradition of larger-than-life California rappers like Mac Dre. The production is bouncy and led by fun samples (one song loops Vince Guaraldi’s piano; another takes cues from Myaap’s heavenly 2025 TikTok hit “Fairy”) that don’t feel like novelties or overshadow Faith’s rapping. The scrappy approach of this EP reminds me of what was sometimes called the “sugar trap” era almost a decade ago, when women like Rico Nasty and Bali Baby presented a different side of the floaty, male-dominated SoundCloud groundswell. Faith has a good musical coach in her family, too. Her dad, T-Nutty, has been one of Sacramento’s most prominent rappers since the 2000s, with a technical, “chopper” style, and Faith’s “Gimme a Penthouse?” interpolates his local rapping-the-ABCs hit “I Need My Bread” from 2005.
Faith mostly stays in one gear: songs to blast in the car and make your friends do a double-take before they’re won over. The two melodic bonus tracks tacked onto the EP to tentatively demonstrate Faith’s range aren’t as energized or full of those daring “g-g-g-g-g-gas” phrasings that stick in your brain, but Faith is naturally weird enough on the mic that they’re at least enjoyable. The most promising layer of Faith’s music is its motivational spirit, both written in the lyrics—like her story on “Gimme a Break?” of paying for a one-way flight to her debut New York show instead of fixing her brakes—and implicit in the way she just keeps going, entertaining herself, trying to make anything stick and generally succeeding.
