Who knows what this album would’ve sounded like if Flo Milli hadn’t posted that TikTok last September, fanning out a stack of bills in a sparsely appointed condo, grills glinting as she rapped: “He speed in the Wraith while his hand on my coochie/He touching Emilio Pucci.”
Flo had already released one single, “Fruit Loop,” with another, “Chocolate Rain,” set to drop that week. Those two songs, along with the October single “BGC,” were produced by the up-and-coming Young Fyre, who had previously co-produced Flo’s vindictively bratty bop “Conceited.” According to an interview with Rolling Stone last year, Fyre produced at least 10 tracks for Flo’s “vulnerable” follow-up to 2022’s You Still Here, Ho?
None of those songs appear on Fine Ho, Stay. It’s easy to imagine how the viral success of “Never Lose Me” might have upended the Alabama rapper’s rollout—picture a mid-level label manager breathlessly recounting the metrics to her team, previously closed budgets suddenly reopening. Fine Ho, Stay is accordingly expensive, laced with beats by established hitmakers like Bangladesh, ATL Jacob, and Lex Luger, and offers some of Flo’s best songs yet. It’s a worthy closer to the trilogy set off by 2020’s Ho, why is you here ?, but it’s hard to shake the sensation that Flo Milli can make a better album than this.
That’s mostly thanks to Flo Milli herself, whose nimble flows curl anodyne ideas into pleasingly irregular shapes. On “Edible,” a particularly gifted lover doesn’t make Flo feel perfect or flawless, but “impeccable”; the strobing start-stop of “Tell Me What You Want” will likely leave you muttering “Men like to talk and I hate it” for weeks. Her syncopated flows handspring and pitter-patter towards vivid phrases and sticky earworms, as on the double-dutch trap anthem “Got the Juice,” where Flo alternates hot and cold: “I’m so confusing, he can’t tell if I’m in love or if I’m using/I just lost my eater damn, let’s get to recruiting.”
Speaking of eaters, Fine Ho, Stay is almost exclusively focused on sexual competition. Milli still flexes the karats in her watch and a minor caravan of luxury vehicles, but she’s more concerned with her harem, in particular the assets they offer—cash, comfort, cunnilingus. On “Neva,” Flo makes “a rich nigga go broke”; on “New Me,” she sizes up the guy’s whole friend group to make sure she fucks the hottest one. The hoes bear few to no distinguishing traits, a cast of NPCs who exist solely to confirm the intensity of Milli’s sex appeal.
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
