AM I THE DRAMA?

Album ∙ Hip-Hop/Rap ∙ 2025

Cardi B

It’s been seven years since the Bronx superstar’s debut album, 2018’s record-breaking Invasion of Privacy, which debuted atop the Billboard 200 with the largest female rap streaming week of all time and made Cardi the first solo female artist to win the Best Rap Album Grammy. For anybody wondering what she’s been up to in the meantime, allow her to set the record straight: When she wasn’t flexing at Fashion Week, she was mostly holed up in the studio, battling a mean case of writer’s block. “I really went through a crash where nothing was pleasing me—nothing,” the artist born Belcalis Almánzar tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. Despite spending more time in the studio than at home, Cardi describes recording song after song that just didn’t feel right while fans clamored for Invasion of Privacy’s hotly anticipated follow-up.

Rather than brush off the funk, Cardi harnessed the full force of its power on AM I THE DRAMA?, her long-awaited sophomore album, named for a revelation after a vain attempt to stay out of the headlines. “For some reason, I’m getting tried even when I’m not saying nothing,” she says. “And it’s like, damn—do drama chase me, or am I just the drama?” Here, the unapologetic MC channels her pent-up aggression into belligerent trap bangers that remind you who’s the “first rap bitch on the cover of Vogue.” “I tried to come in peace/They tore me into pieces/Now I gotta RIP it,” she snarls on “Dead,” which opens with a report of a recent crime spree targeting “bloggers, journalists, and, most chillingly, several female rappers” before Summer Walker sings about pulling off her enemies’ lacefronts.

“I’m a very colorful person,” Cardi tells Lowe. “But this past year, I feel like something kind of was dying inside of me. My humbleness, me trying so much to be unproblematic, me trying to avoid drama, avoid the disses, avoid the bitches—that’s dying out in me. Because I’m really about to show you, bitch, that you are not fucking with me. The cockiness is being born again.” The attitude comes through on “Imaginary Playerz,” Cardi’s riff on the 1997 JAY-Z classic, which was born on a bad day in the studio during the summer of 2024. “I was really caught in a funk,” she explains. “It was the third, fourth day that I’m sleeping on the couch in the studio. I’m exhausted. I’m pregnant as fuck. And I was just going through some drama in my life, and I just was so tired, so over it.” Trying to lighten the mood, her engineer blasted the JAY-Z original, and a light bulb went off. “I’m like, ‘Yo, imagine if I flip this, but my way,’” she thought, suddenly remembering that she had an awful lot to brag about.

Amidst all the DRAMA, there are moments of levity—she recruits Selena Gomez, Tyla, and Lourdiz for a trio of sultry R&B bops, flips a Janet Jackson classic for the buoyant “Principal,” and reps her roots on “Bodega Baddie,” a high-octane norteño banger. But first, there are shots to be fired—whether at her so-called peers or at the low-down, dirty dogs she disses over the Triggerman sample on “Outside.” And on “Man of Your Word,” she opens up about the demise of her marriage over mournful steel drums. Between the flexing and the reflecting, DRAMA feels like catharsis—and that’s before it ends on 2020’s record-shattering, zeitgeist-capturing “WAP.”