Album Review: Who Did the Body by Monaleo

Monaleo shows how trap can hold testimony, how braggadocio can coexist with grief, and how a Houston rapper can turn her own reckoning into a public sermon without losing the plot or the punchline.

Courtesy of Stomp Down, Inc.

There’s a moment early in Who Did the Body where Monaleo asks a question so profane it becomes theological: “Can I skip the judgment line? I don’t like waiting.” She’s dead, hypothetically, and already negotiating with God like He’s customer service. It’s gallows humor weaponized into prayer, the kind of irreverence that doubles as intimacy. This is the voice that defines her 2025 project: unafraid of death because she’s already spent years cataloging what survival costs. The Houston rapper, now married and reckoning with what permanence means, has made an album that treats mortality not as metaphor but as a study in what happens when the body that carried you through chaos finally asks what comes next.

The opening track, “Life After Death,” sets the terms immediately. Over production that feels both spectral and swaggering, Monaleo positions herself as already gone, narrating her own funeral with the clinical detachment of someone who’s rehearsed this scene a thousand times. With her saying, “Life after death, is it lit or not?” is flippant and devastating, collapsing eschatology into slang. She wants her service live-streamed “like I’m Kai,” intends to haunt her ex’s mother, and wants confirmation that heaven has a dress code she can violate. The verse where she wonders if her partner can bring his Hellcat to paradise, or if weapons violate “the policy,” isn’t an interrogation of what Black Southern life demands you carry, even into the afterlife. “I like head, can I still get licked or not?” has been read as shock tactics, but listen closer: it’s a woman refusing to sanitize her desires even in death, insisting that pleasure isn’t something she’ll apologize for at the pearly gates.

What makes this tape radical isn’t just its subject matter but its tonal elasticity. Monaleo moves from trap bravado to spoken-word vulnerability without warning, treating both registers as equally valid forms of testimony. On “Bigger Than Big,” she returns to the swaggering id of her earlier work—the song is pure ego, a five-minute assertion of dominance that borders on absurdist. “I’m bigger than Ben/I’m bigger than these bitches’ wigs” operates on playground logic, but the precision of her internal rhyme schemes and her ability to stretch syllables into new shapes (“I’m sticking and move/Get in the mix and get out”) reveal a technical sharpness that elevates what could’ve been empty boasting. The Taurus birthday flex, the mammogram punchline, the will.i.am reference that lands because of its sheer randomness—it all coheres into a portrait of someone who knows confidence is performance but performs it so well it becomes real.

But the tape’s power lies in how quickly it pivots. “Sexy Soulaan” arrives like a manifesto, and it’s the closest thing here to a mission statement. The production is stark, the flow militant, and Monaleo’s voice sharpens into something confrontational. “All the non-Blacks to the back” isn’t subtle, and it’s not meant to be—it’s a line drawn in concrete, a refusal to code-switch or soften for palatability. The verse about red brick on her doorstep, about not shaking white hands, about enforcing who gets to say which words—it reads as uncompromising, and in the current climate, that’s precisely the point. Whether you find it empowering or alienating likely depends on where you stand, but Monaleo isn’t interested in consensus. She’s staking a claim to Blackness as inheritance, as armor, as language that belongs to specific mouths. The bridge—“Big lips/Big hips/Gold hoops”—is pure affirmation, a catalog of features too often policed or fetishized, reclaimed here as a source of power.

The tape’s most ambitious stretch comes with “Open the Gates,” a track that shifts from celebration to elegy without warning. Monaleo lists her homegirls by name—Enchanting, Darren, Yonna, Xaven—each one sketched in a few deft lines, each one gone. The “we supposed to been” becomes an eschew of stolen futures: at the Grammys, on yachts, in Miami, taking Plan B’s after reckless nights. It’s a song about mourning the mundane as much as the monumental, about the specific grief of losing people who would’ve loved your new success. When she asks someone to “open the gates” so she can see her friends again, it’s both literal and liturgical—heaven as reunion, death as the only door left unlocked. The specificity matters here: she doesn’t generalize loss, she names it, and in doing so refuses to let these women become footnotes.

“Tamron Hall” pulls back to examine family with the same unblinking clarity. The hook—“I’m not finna sit up and talk all day, my name is not Tamron Hall”—is a joke that doubles as a thesis, as Monaleo refuses the role of therapist or mediator, even as she chronicles her cousin’s calls, her brother’s joblessness, the way love tangles with obligation. The verse about teaching her brother that “the world is not gonna stop” when he chases his dreams is tender but clear-eyed, advice delivered without sentiment. She knows what it costs to make it, knows that talent doesn’t guarantee survival, and she’s trying to prepare him without crushing him. The bridge about people coming and going, about focusing on what you can control, feels like something learned through loss rather than read in a book.

Then there’s “Locked In,” which might be the tape’s most structurally sophisticated track. It’s a breakup song, but one that refuses easy binaries. Monaleo catalogs her devotion, mentioning his name in rooms she barely accessed, dropping everything when he called, but she also acknowledges her own complicity, the way she tried to buy his heart without checking the price. The line “I was shooting in the gym/But what happens when I get sore” uses a sports metaphor to talk about emotional labor—what happens when the person you’ve been performing excellence for stops watching. The verse about picking up pieces, about being in the bleachers during his off-season, flips the script on who gets credit in relationships. She’s not bitter, exactly; she’s accounting, listing what she gave and what it cost, then walking away with the math done.

But the tape’s true centerpiece might be “Spare Change” and “Dignified,” back-to-back meditations on death that strip away all posturing. “Spare Change” is a narrative song, almost cinematic: Monaleo witnesses a homeless man’s death, sees the red cup with a single dollar, then jumps forward years to find herself working as an undertaker, confronting the man’s daughter at the table. The daughter, Mabel, became a stripper, got a tattoo for her father Earl, and died alone—a product of inherited trauma, of a world that forgot both of them. The hook (“Don’t be stingy, spend some change/Don’t you know that bums have a name?”) is a plea and accusation, asking listeners to see humanity in places we’ve been trained to look past. It’s heavy-handed at times, the moral spelled out too clearly, but the storytelling itself is precise enough to earn its sentiment.

“Dignified” goes further, using a drunk-driving scenario to examine how death rewrites your story. The first-person narrative—five women leaving a club, all too intoxicated, Monaleo behind the wheel out of necessity—builds with quiet dread. When the crash comes, it’s not dramatized; it’s reported like fact. The aftermath is what haunts: Fox News calling her a troubled star, her mother confused because she doesn’t drink and drive, the realization that “how you die might become just who you are.” It’s a cautionary tale, yes, but also something sharper—a recognition that identity is fragile, that legacy can be rewritten by a single mistake, that the steering wheel “done pushed my skull in” is the last image anyone will carry. The repeated hook—“Please let me die dignified”—becomes prayer, a wish to control the narrative even when you can’t control the ending.

There are some obvious missteps. “Freak Show” with Lizzo, despite its energy, feels like it belongs to a different project—more interested in shock value than the tape’s larger concerns. The explicitness isn’t the issue; it’s that the song doesn’t interrogate or complicate, it just performs. Lizzo’s verse leans into raunch without the tonal nuance Monaleo usually brings, and the result feels more like playlist fodder than essential listening. Similarly, “We On Dat (OG Mix),” featuring Houston legends (Bun B, Paul Wall, Lil’ Keke), works as a regional homage but doesn’t advance the tape’s thematic arc. It’s sturdy, professionally executed, but it’s also the least necessary track here, existing more to satisfy genre expectations than to deepen the project’s exploration of mortality and meaning. However, it doesn’t take that the record still slaps.

“Putting Ya Dine” is pure technical flex, Monaleo riding the beat with the kind of rhythmic dexterity that made her early singles viral. The wordplay is relentless (“I’m sticking and move/Get in the mix and get out/I got a mission to do”), and her ability to pack syllables into tight pockets without losing clarity is impressive. But the song doesn’t ask much of the listener beyond admiration, and on a tape otherwise concerned with reckoning, it feels like a palate cleanser rather than a pillar.

With “Diary of an OG,” this strips everything back to just Monaleo’s voice over minimal production, a confession about being the oldest girl. This parentified child cooked and cleaned and forgot she had needs. It’s the tape’s most vulnerable moment, and also its most universal. The singing of “I’ll always be the oldest girl” becomes the kind of truth that doesn’t need ornamentation. When she says, “I wasn’t brought in this world to be a stepstool/I am just as great as whoever I stand next to,” it lands not as an affirmation but as a hard-won realization, something she’s still learning to believe.

Who Did the Body doesn’t resolve its questions, and that’s its strength. Monaleo isn’t offering answers about what comes after death, or how to reconcile faith with fury, or what it means to survive when so many don’t. She’s documenting the asking, turning her uncertainty into architecture. The tape is uneven; some songs feel like they’re checking boxes rather than breaking ground, but at its best, it’s a self-authored eulogy turned survival manual—a document of Black Southern womanhood negotiating divinity, depression, and self-mythmaking without apology. This is an artist who’s discovered that the body that carries you can also be the site of inquiry, and that sometimes the most honest thing you can do is ask the question aloud: who did the body? And what happens when the body is yours?

Solid (★★★½☆)

Favorite Track(s): “Life After Death,” “Spare Change,” “Locked In”