Album Review: Yo Favorite Trappa Favorite Rappa by Sexyy Red
Her fourth tape is the first that the St. Louis rapper has built like a real mixtape, DJ Holiday hosting throughout and the trapper-rapper distinction collapsing on contact.
For the last two decades, women in rap who deal in trap material have been told to pick a side. Character work or résumé, never both. The men who do exactly the same job get a third option the women don’t. Janae Wherry has been litigated under those terms since “Pound Town.” On her fourth full-length, released on her twenty-eighth birthday, the St. Louis rapper who performs as Sexyy Red declines the choice. DJ Holiday hosts the tape end-to-end. The title, your favorite trapper, your favorite rapper, is a Quavo line repurposed as a self-coronation.
DJ Holiday is on every track. His drops, his ad-libs, his “Holiday season” tag flash through every chorus and beat-switch. What he brings reaches back to the early-2010s mixtape circuit Sexyy grew up listening to. Trap-A-Holics on a Gucci Mane tape, Drama on a Cassidy tape, Burn One on Pill. That genre-era choice is the first real nod she has made on a record to the music she came up on. When Tay Keith’s drums come in on “Cut Like Us (Blood Sustaz),” they sit underneath Holiday’s voice instead of next to a streaming-platform-friendly intro silence. Most 2026 albums get engineered for the algorithm. This is a tape.
Body politics in commercial rap from “Pound Town” backward have been BBL-coded for fifteen years. Cosmetic surgery has been the entry fee for women in the videos and the magazines, and the ones who didn’t pay it disappeared from both. “Team Lil Booty” is the corrective. Sexyy lays out the brief in the intro:
“Calling all my lil’ booty bitches
I need all petite shit, all lil’ shit right now
Stand up.”
Sexyy renames the standard instead of arguing it:
“Yeah, I know I’m petite, still bitch you up
They sayin’ I’m skinny, but I know I’m thick
I don’t see what you seeing, fuck you bitch.”
PLUTO comes in second, and she’s good. Better than I expected her to be when she showed up on the song. Her half is the most useful guest spot on the tape, since she doesn’t make an exception for petite women but says what she likes. Sexyy got into the room anyway, and from inside the room she names herself the standard. She isn’t arguing on her verse, she half-laughs through it, bored, like the question wasted her time.
Her funniest hook on the tape arrives on the song where she sues her ex-boyfriend before he can sell the story:
“This coochie require a NDA
I don’t care that you play for the NBA
These lil’ niggas talk too much today
If you gon’ run your fuckin’ mouth, I’d rather have the pay.”
Legal wordage deployed as romance. She’s annoyed enough at the talker to want his brother. “You talk too much, I want your brother.” The shrug after, “But it’s cool, I still love ya,” comes out with the flat affect of a shopping list. Sexyy has been writing hooks like this her whole career. “NDA” is the cleanest one yet.
There is no aspirational money on this tape. Every flex turns comparative, set against a specific named enemy and proven dollar by dollar. “Richer Than Alla My Opps” runs the cleanest version of the trick, with the gap inventoried against a face. On “Rackies” with ATL Jacob, the receipts show up in the bars themselves, “Northside shorty, ramen noodles for dinner,” and the closing punchline twists the knife, “Yo’ bitch purse empty, come and fuck with a winner.” “David Ruffin” extends the frame to genealogy, casting Sexyy as the lead singer who outgrew the group. “Ran me up some bands, I-I ain’t do no fuckin’/These bitches the Temptations, I think I’m David Ruffin.” Ruffin got kicked out for ego and cocaine in 1968 and was dead at fifty in 1991, but Sexyy isn’t asking you to know that.
Metro Boomin and Zaytoven get the closing slot, and the tape ran out of road on it. “Yop” wants to be a victory lap, and Metro’s intro speech is doing the heaviest lifting on it. By the second verse I am waiting for the song to be over, and Sexyy is on “yop, yop, yop” in a way that sounds tired. It doesn’t matter much. This thing lives or dies on “Cut Like Us (Blood Sustaz)” anyway. Tay Keith puts the snare exactly where she needs it, Pretty Pinkk and Ghetto Beisha get out of her way and walk back in for verses that do not sound like guest verses, and the long intro says the thing every other song on the tape is also trying to say:
“Who need friends, baby? We got family over here.”
Solid (★★★½☆)
Favorite Track(s): “Team Lil Booty,” “Cut Like Us (Blood Sustaz),” “NDA”