the scarlet tour
It somehow feels like both yesterday and a decade ago that Doja Cat lambasted her fans, told them to “get a job,” and lost nearly 250,000 Instagram followers. The road to Scarlet has been littered with potential blockades, but like a true feline, Doja Cat flexed her nine lives and turned the campaign for her new featureless album into a run that included not just her first unaccompanied Billboard Hot 100 chart-topper, but also the first hip-hop song to reach No. 1 on the chart in 2023.
The last time Doja put out a studio album, she went intergalactic. Wrapping in trap, Afrobeats, slinky R&B and sugar straightforward pop, Planet Her netted Doja a No. 2 peak on the Billboard 200, her first Grammy, and a litany of hits, including the SZA-assisted “Kiss Me More” (No. 3), “Woman” (No. 7), “Need to Know” (No. 8), “You Right” (No. 11, with The Weeknd), and “Get Into It (Yuh)” (No. 20).
Prior to that, the cross-genre marvel joined forces with Nicki Minaj for her first Hot 100 No. 1 single, “Say So” — a nu-disco quarantine anthem that helped launch both its parent album (Hot Pink) and Doja’s career to staggering new heights. In many ways, Scarlet — with its moody overtone and horrorcore-nodding aesthetic — is a response to the precariousness of those heights and the pressures they place on an artist who simply just wants to make music and find happiness in her life.
In many ways, Doja prepped Scarlet as a back-to-basics record that would focus on flaunting her skills as an emcee. She launched the era with the boom-bap-indebted “Attention,” doubled down on the pop-rap with the Dionne Warwick-sampling “Paint the Town Red,” and dabbled in punk-rap and lo-fi on promotional singles “Demons” and “Balut,” respectively. As a complete unit, Scarlet finds Doja flexing her muscle in different rap subgenres as she relies on a fiery new love to release from the twisted hamster wheel of the fanatic-artist dynamic. From jazz rap and punk rap to neo-soul and pluggnb, Doja is at the height of her chameleonic powers on Scarlet.
With a plethora of new songs to sort through and a tour on the horizon, which tracks are the true highlights of this record? Here is a preliminary ranking of every song on Doja Cat’s Scarlet.
“Shutcho”
“Remember this, girls,” rings the intro of Doja Cat’s latest new track. “None of you can be first, but all of you can be next.” The intro — lifted from professional wrestler Ric Flair — heralds the beginning of “Balut,” the final song on the star’s upcoming new album Scarlet and its most recent single. […]
Forget Blossom, Bubbles and Buttercup: We have Doja Cat, Ice Spice and Doechii.
The three rappers took Instagram by storm on Monday (Sept. 11) with a series of snaps from a New York Fashion Week afterparty on Sunday night.
“Come see us all on tour and central cee is a great dude also my pepperonis,” Doja captioned an eclectic photo set that featured cameos from “Barbie World” producer RIOTUSA and U.K. rapper Central Cee, the artist behind the U.K. No. 2 hit “Doja.”
Ice Spice posted a similar photo dump, with hers featuring a few glimpses of “Sh– Me Out” rapper NLE Choppa. “Cench riot doechii doja,” Ice wrote in the caption. Her post comes the same day as the announcement of her new collaboration with Dunkin’ Donuts; more details surrounding the collaboration will be revealed on Sept. 13.
Doechii, whose “What It Is (Block Boy)” reaches the top 10 on Pop Airplay this week (No. 10, chart dated Sept. 16, 2023), also shared her own collection of photos, captioned, “real life power puff girls.” In her photo set, the “Persuasive” rapper included a behind-the-scenes video of her, Doja Cat and Ice Spice posing for a bevy of cameras.
The union of Doja, Ice and Doechii wasn’t just a one-off girls’ night out: The three rap stars are set to hit the road this fall. Ice Spice and Doechii will serve as opening acts for Doja Cat’s Scarlet Tour. The 24-date tour will kick off on Halloween, Oct. 31, at San Francisco’s Chase Center and hit major cities across the U.S. before wrapping Dec. 13 at Chicago’s United Center.
The Scarlet Tour is in support of Doja Cat’s forthcoming fourth studio album, Scarlet, set for release Sept. 22. So far, the album has yielded a pair of Billboard Hot 100 top 40 hits: “Attention” (No. 31) and “Paint the Town Red,” which recently became the first rap song to hit No. 1 in more than a year (chart dated Sept. 16). A promotional single titled “Demons” arrived earlier this month (Sept. 1) alongside a Christina Ricci-starring music video.
Check out Doja, Ice and Doechii’s flashy new flicks:
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