Flo Milli reiterates and occasionally expands her brand on You Still Here, Ho?

You Still Here, Ho? employs similar templates, Milli’s lyrics consistently confrontive, her beats and synthy textures alternating between DIY schmaltz and trendy lounge vibes. The result is a project that reiterates and occasionally expands Milli’s truculent brand.

“Come Outside” spotlights the Alabama rapper as she issues ego-fueled taunts and proclamations, she and her friends waiting outside a rival’s door. “Bedtime” features Milli at her most pugilistic, moving from blow-torch lyrical streams to more staccato pronouncements. Crisp beats and '90s-era sonic accents combined with a well-integrated Kevin Hart reference (“make a ho go night-night”) give the track a neo-g-funk feel.

While the debut included its share of undiluted putdowns and side shades, the new set is more unabashedly misandrist. “I could be yo’ freak up in the sheets but you can’t wife me,” Milli declares on “No Face,” expressing a transactional approach to relationships and sex. With “On My Nerves”, she reiterates this stance, referring to someone as a “boy toy,” then adding, “I pay attention to him / he pays checks.” Dropping the man-hating rant and going fully pro-fem, Milli offers “F.N.G.M.”, perhaps a gritty response to Little Simz’s “Woman”: “I got a CEO bitch she be callin’ shots / my real estate bitch she be sellin’ lots / my jeweler bitch keep me laced with the rocks / I hit my nail tech up she ain’t have a slot.”

Milli embraces R&B stylistics on “Tilted Halo,” striving to broaden the album’s stylistic range, though the track’s melody and choppy phrasing land as a bit generic. “Pretty Girls,” on the other hand, shows Milli successfully merging wry bubblegum and tongue-in-cheek gangsterism. “PBC” (“Pretty black cute”), meanwhile, brims with razor-sharp aspersions and dashes of braggadocious humor. A grungy bass part and fuzzy beats evoke an effective lo-fi feel.

You Still Here, Ho? runs the fundamentals of hip-hop – aggression, wit, violent diarism, and primitivistic sounds – through a contemporary filter largely defined by social media and selfie culture. You Still Here, Ho? offers a snapshot circa 2022, reminding us that, at least when it comes to the competitive side of human nature and the fallouts of capitalism, the 2020s may not be that different from the 2010s, 2000s, 1990s, and so on. Different trappings, same dynamic.