All of the pieces are beginning to fall into place for Saweetie as she inches closer to wrapping up her long-awaited debut album, Pretty B**ch Music. She has been teasing the body of work since being thrust into stardom, but after a series of delays, it seems as though go-time could finally be near.
“I locked in for eight months straight, and I tried every genre. I just had to get it out [of] my system. But now I feel like I found my sound,” she told radio personality Big Boy in a new interview. “I have eight solid songs; I think I want a 10 or 12 [song] album,” Saweetie added. Her latest party track for the girls, “NANi,” and video were released on May 17, weeks into fans pleading for the full song after being fed snippets.
On the flirty new cut, she sings, “Ooh, got that nani, nani, nani/ How she walk through, swingin’ that body/ Yellin’, ’Who gon’ stop me?’/ You ain’t got the time to clock me/ Ooh, got that nani, nani, nani/ Big, bag, I’ma fill it up with money," piggybacking on the theme of February's "Richtivities."
With various offers on the table to tour, the “My Type” artist also shared that she is excited to hit the road, having stepped up her stage game. “I feel like after you put out an album, you’re able to go on a dope tour, and I love performing now. I used to get really nervous because they used to tear my a** up online,” she told Big Boy.
For Saweetie, that phase of figuring out who you are as an artist and then introducing the persona to the world happened in reverse — it’s an experience that many new artists now face and one that she feels can do a disservice to them in the long run.
“‘ICY GRL’ blew up overnight, and that was my first song, and it really like threw me into the industry and got me booked on a lot of radio shows, a lot of club hosting,” she recalled of the 2018 hit song that sampled rapper Khia’s raunchy anthem, “My Neck, My Back.” Since then, the self-proclaimed content creator has been in the limelight, whether on her short-lived YouTube vlog series, video sets, the stages of Coachella and Rolling Loud, or most recently with her role on the series “BMF.”
She continued, “I never like, I’m not a natural-born performer, like I’m naturally an athlete, not really a performer when it comes to music. So, I realized quickly that I like needed to get better with my stage presence, and you know, I’m just happy to be here. I’m coming in smiling. I perform [and] oh my gosh, my first shows, and then I’m being [dragged] online, so it was like my happiness was taken from me so quickly, but I just feel like as young artists, we’re thrown into the game so quickly because if a viral song goes, the demand is there… So my gym time was stage time.”
In 2021, Saweetie revealed that she was enrolled in a performance bootcamp to help build her stamina and work on choreography. “I think that my music, especially for Pretty B**ch Music, deserves a level of discipline from me so that when I perform these songs, my level of performance matches the presence of my music,” she told Complex at the time.
As summer heats up, Pretty B**ch Music’s release date remains unknown, but she has promised that more versions of the current banger are forthcoming. In the meantime, check out her full interview with Big Boy below.