Album Review: Note to Self by Dess Dior
On Note to Self, there are fifteen tracks of designer-bag gospel and relationship checklists from an Atlanta rapper whose money raps outpace her pen.
Savannah, Georgia, doesn’t get mentioned much in rap origin stories. The city’s main export for decades has been college football players and people who leave. Destiny Bailey left at eighteen, right after graduating Savannah High in 2016, driving the five hours to Atlanta with a laptop full of songs she’d been recording since fourteen. She’d been rapping since twelve, raised on Trina, and once she started putting out music as Dess Dior in 2020, the formula was already locked: spend money, demand more of it, tell any man who falls short to keep walking. Her debut EP Definition of Dess had that down. The six-track Take Notes EP in February had it down again. Note to Self, her sophomore album, has it down fifteen times.
Dess’s money talk gets real exactly once. “I’m the first person they call for them bond fees,” she raps on “Too Blessed,” and the line puts an actual scene behind the spending. Her dad went to jail. She lost a brother. She bought the big Range and the big house and still cried on the couch. “Soft girl but that don’t mean I ain’t thug it out.” The AP wristwatch she mentions two lines later is the receipt for a life where nobody else was footing the bill. “I can’t call nobody, I’m the one that niggas call.” When the luxury talk on Note to Self works, it runs like this: the Birkin and the bills and the private island all pointing back to the same claim, which is that she bought every bit of it herself. The rest of the record (and there’s a lot of it, fifteen tracks worth) keeps making that argument with fewer receipts each time.
Dess likes a screening process. “Tell Me Now” grills whoever’s sitting across from her: “if you a weird-ass nigga, tell me now,” “if you a cheap-ass nigga, tell me now,” down through Uber drivers and baby-mama situations. Belly Gang Kushington’s response bars help, mostly for the audacity of answering “Yeah, I love my baby mama, and?” to the woman who just finished questioning him. “Come Correct” asks for a gentleman. “IDC” says she’ll replace him. “Fine AF” flips the questionnaire onto herself. “Spinnin’” cycles through “spending a bag, spend on your ex, spending the night, spending your time, spending a check.” That screening works once; by the fifth round, Dess is describing what she needs the identical way on half the tracklist.
Helluva and Antt Beatz produced “Different Pages” with heavier, slower drums and a pads-first arrangement the rest of the LP doesn’t attempt. Dess drops lower. “Keep on clashing cause we can’t communicate.” “They ain’t tell me hard work came with heartbreak.” She needs to come over and put her head in his arms while he kisses her shoulders, but she also heard he was out smiling at other women, and she can’t pick which feeling to act on. “It’s no one’s fault bae this just ain’t our moment.” Before this song she’d been the one deciding, the one leaving, the one who set the terms. Here she’s torn, and it shows: she loves his ambition but it keeps him gone, and the distance gives both of them room to fail each other.
YFN Lucci hadn’t rapped publicly in four years before he cut his verse on “Missin You,” fresh off a RICO plea deal, and he spends it taking inventory of what his wallet used to say:
“Three million in cars when I pull off them paper tags
Two hundred on the patek, let her know I miss her bad.”
His sixteen bars fit Dess’s range, two people measuring affection in dollar amounts. Valiant, on “Spoil Me,” yanks the record somewhere it hasn’t been. The track is the one place where the money flows both directions:
“Anything you prefer you can get it from me
Anything you like ye baby me buy
No matter the price.”
Valiant’s patois shifts the cadence off the Atlanta grid the other fourteen tracks ride. For a record that stays in one lane on purpose, the two minutes of dancehall feel like cracking a window in a car that’s had the AC running the whole drive.
Dess sounds comfortable on “Go,” canceling plans for a man she wants to settle down with over a drop-top Benz and a moon she actually seems happy about. The jetsonmade beat on “Missin You” knocks harder than most of what’s around it. But across fifteen cuts and fourteen different producer credits (nobody handling more than a pair), Note to Self blurs. The production doesn’t damage the tracks; it also doesn’t separate them. Dess’s voice, a mid-range delivery that keeps the same speed whether she’s bragging or venting, holds the record together the way a playlist holds together, fine in the background, hard to distinguish once you pull any single track out and ask what it’s doing that the last one wasn’t. She’s funniest grilling men on “Tell Me Now,” most honest admitting confusion on “Different Pages,” and most alive on “Spoil Me” when somebody else’s language shakes her out of her own cadence. On “M4,” she spits, “Too bad so sad/Nigga lost the baddest bitch that he could ever have.” Top down, ex in the rearview, not looking back.
Above Average (★★★☆☆)
Favorite Tracks: “Too Blessed,” “Different Pages,” “Spoil Me”