When NME speaks to Trim, the 19-year-old is still riding a high. Days before, Young Thug invited the Charleston rapper to join him on stage at his New York pop-up show, performing her current smash ‘Nobody’ with Thugger hyped behind her. It’s yet another milestone in what has been a dizzying year for one of Southern rap’s fastest-rising stars.
Since bursting through with the swaggering breakout single ‘Boat’ last year, Trim has quickly become one of rap’s most awe-inspiring new personalities. Via a slew of other releases, including ‘Taxi’, ‘Bugatti’ and ‘Coconut Water’, she’s amassed a growing army of fans who have already crowned her the “princess of rap” thanks to her shape-shifting flows and larger-than-life personality.
It’s a title that would seem wildly premature for an artist yet to release a debut album. Trim, however, doesn’t seem remotely fazed by it. “The fans are calling me it,” she shrugs. “When you’re around legendary people, they don’t even have to call you the ‘princess of rap’. That already stands.”
It makes for an interesting contrast to the person behind the persona. Before millions of streams, viral one-liners and being christened as rap royalty, Trim was known as Ahlaisha Kornickey, a self-described shy kid growing up in Charleston, South Carolina. Home life, she says, followed a familiar routine of waking up, doing what needed to be done at school and heading straight back home.
“I was very to myself,” she remembers, recalling being envious of other people around her who seemed to possess a kind of magnetic quality. “Everybody around me had explosive personalities. I had to learn how to gain that.” Looking back now, she’s almost grateful for that more timid version of herself and the journey she’s gone on to consciously build her confidence, gradually growing into the larger-than-life character that now commands festival stages and internet timelines alike.
Before rap, Trim says she wasn’t chasing fame – her goal was simply to “find her purpose”, something she eventually discovered through music. On record, she learned to express herself publicly when, before, she rarely had the chance to “get things off [her] chest”. It’s that same sense of purpose that now sits at the heart of ‘Pass The Tiara’, the long-awaited project she first began teasing as an EP, but is increasingly seeing as her debut album.
Rather than chase quick hits, she wants to make records that stay with people long after the first listen, and that resonate with her listeners. The message she wants them to take from the upcoming record? “Don’t think that just because you’re not doing what you’re supposed to do right now, that you’re a nobody. You should always feel comfortable within yourself, but always want more.”
That mindset naturally seeped into the way she began making music a year and a half ago. Trim doesn’t agonise over every lyric, preferring to freestyle and chase instinct before refining songs later. It’s an approach shaped, in part, by Young Thug, whose willingness to treat his voice as another instrument fundamentally changed how she thought about rap. Listening to him “drag” and “sing” over feverish trap beats, she naturally adopted that sound, but, rather than imitate him, Trim took permission to experiment. Across songs like ‘Nobody’ and ‘Coconut Water’, she darts between melodies, elastic flows and different vocal inflexions without ever sounding tied to one style. “I’m not afraid to try nothing new,” she says simply.
“Every song has to have meaning. Every song has to be your best work of art”
Long before millions of people discovered her music, Trim had already decided what her greatest weapon would be. Inspired by NBA YoungBoy‘s relentless output, she made herself a promise: “I’m always gonna be a consistent artist.” Songs like 2025’s ‘Taxi’ and ‘Bugatti’ arrived in rapid succession, steadily building a loyal online following, but it wasn’t until ‘Boat’ broke through that many listeners began digging back through her catalogue, causing those older tracks to pick up steam.
Looking back, she’s amused by how differently she viewed those records at the time. “When I received love after the fact, it kind of threw me off,” she shares, explaining that she had already moved on from those songs and was ready to make her next hit. “I had to learn that it’s OK to promote your old songs and let people enjoy your old music.” To Trim, success has never been about chasing a single viral hit, but about showing up often enough that people eventually catch up.
‘Coconut Water’, released this May, became the moment they finally did. By then, anticipation had steadily grown online after Trim teased a snippet a month prior. “Y’all wanted ‘Coconut Water’ for so long,” she laughs. “I made [it] in, like, February or March [this year]. The song was so old.” Like much of her catalogue, it began with a freestyle, before she gradually returned to shape the verses around a hook she knew she couldn’t ignore.
“I like to do catchy hooks,” she explains. “If I know it’s a good hook that everybody loves, I’m gonna come back to it.” When the track finally arrived, it exploded across TikTok and beyond, introducing her shape-shifting delivery to millions of new listeners and transforming one of rap’s most exciting prospects into one of its most talked-about newcomers.
The success of ‘Coconut Water’ also brought inevitable comparisons to the queen of charismatic rap personality: Nicki Minaj. Listeners were quick to draw parallels between Trim’s animated delivery, rapid-fire flows and theatrical use of different voices, but she struggles to hear the similarities herself. “Honestly… I don’t really get it,” she says. “‘Coconut Water’ don’t sound nothing like nobody. Not even Beyoncé.” That is, perhaps, the point – you know a Trim record within seconds, not because it follows a formula, but because nobody else sounds quite like her.
That doesn’t mean she won’t get measured against other artists, as she learnt earlier this year when she described ‘Pass The Tiara’ as her own ‘Thriller’. Social media users quickly jumped on the comments, comparing her to Michael Jackson, though Trim insists what she meant has been misunderstood. “Every song has to have meaning,” she says. “Every song has to be your best work of art.” The comparison, she explains, was never about outselling Jackson, but about creating a body of work people return to again and again. It’s an ambitious benchmark, but one that reflects how seriously she takes the responsibility of making a debut statement.
Spend even a few minutes talking to Trim, and one thing becomes immediately obvious: she doesn’t think small. Ask where she sees herself in five years, and the answer arrives without hesitation. “A superstar.” There’s no laugh and no attempt to soften the statement. Yet her definition of superstardom has little to do with celebrity. “Being a superstar is showing up,” she says. “A superstar shows up for their fans with no excuses. Having no fears. Going all in.” Whether she’s releasing music, stepping onto a stage beside her influences or quietly preparing her debut album, doubt simply doesn’t seem to exist in her vocabulary.
Ask what she wants five years from now and, for the first time during our conversation, Trim stops talking about the future of her career and starts talking about herself. “I want to be the best version that Ahlaisha never got to be,” she says. “Ahlaisha was scared. Ahlaisha was shy. Ahlaisha wasn’t explosive. Ahlaisha always had the confidence to try. She just didn’t try early enough.” She laughs, before adding: “My goals are self-goals. I’m not trying to be bigger than nobody. If it happens organically… I’m sorry.”
Trim’s ‘Nobody (Remix) (feat. G Herbo)’ is out later this week via BuVision.
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