The Canadian rapper and singer’s sense of playfulness is the highlight of a second album that attempts to reach beyond her raunchy sex-rap comfort zone.
You don’t have to dance to break a sweat listening to Tommy Genesis’ humid synths, murmured asides, and raps about spitting and licking and swallowing. The Canadian singer and model calls it “fetish rap,” a term she coined and an apt descriptor for both the content of her lyrics and her musical niche. Like Shygirl, CupcakKe, and Nicki Minaj, Genesis writes playfully and specifically about sex. Her best tracks are slinky and throbbing, instantly recognizable club anthems that keep popping up on TV—hissing over brassy beats in the Euphoria pilot, purring in the background of the candy-colored media drama The Bold Type. On her second album, goldilocks x, she sets out to soundtrack a spectrum of emotions wider than her trademark brashness. “I want people to relate to it, turn up to it, cry to it, fuck to it and just fucking live to it,” she told DIY.
There are still plenty of classic Tommy bangers to assert and re-introduce herself. “You don’t really know me, I’mma keep it that way,” she whispers on “Manifesto,” over producer Charlie Heat’s walloping club-ready bass. But that deliberate distance undermines the more sentimental stretch in the album’s final three tracks, which center on romance and its aftermath. Genesis experiments with almost maudlin hyperpop on “fuck u u know u can’t make me cry,” wailing the title through layers of distortion and glitchy screams. It’s a breakup track with too many stale lines for such a gifted songwriter: salt in wounds, love that sets you on fire, a tip to Frank Ocean’s “white lies and white lines.” On album closer “hurricane,” among the slowest tracks in her catalog, she interrogates a lover about an ex while a guitar trickles through the background. We don’t learn much about the people who’ve put Genesis in this pained state, or access a more fleshed-out version of the singer herself. There’s a thrill in watching a talented artist reach beyond her comfort zone, but the result is disappointingly flat.
When she’s in her element, though, she’s singular and sparkling, screeching, “You not famous, you a fetus!” at a cheating ex and singing about chewing on a lover’s earlobe. She writes about sex through a surrealist lens, body horror turned horny. “I’m taking off my skin, ooh ooh ooh,” she deadpans on the high-velocity “a woman is a god.” She narrates foreplay on “wild child,” licking toes and pulling hair, but the physicality turns sinister: “Now you sucking out my soul.”
There are marketing terms for what Genesis does—empowering, sex-positive, unabashadly queer—but those don’t capture the wink in her voice, the fun of her music. “Try to make it seem like someone cares about you,” she taunts a guy who’s pacing around outside the club on a fake phone call. She shuts down a lover’s small talk by asking frankly if they can get her wet. The inspiration for “men” might sound like faux-feminist chart kibble—Genesis polled her group chats on what they hated most about guys—but the song is clever and propuslive, with laugh-out-loud ad-libs (“Thought you was a goat boy, shoo!”) and the killer couplet: “Selfish, secretive, possessive, condescending/Even when I cum, I’m pretending.” She strives to surprise.
Her sense of playfulness and irony enchant what otherwise might be a dim, hazy record, and Genesis is at her best when she leans into it. “I finger-painted the fuck out of this album,” she said in the same DIY interview, explaining that she considers herself a conceptual artist. On “peppermint,” she raps about a sex partner’s “oozes” and juices, gliding through omnnapoetia over squelching beats. When goldilocks x reaches beyond the dancefloor and the bedroom to the hangovers and breakups—the moments when the lights flicker on and your stomach caves in—it doesn’t bring the same eye for absurdity. There’s a ridiculousness in feeling anything fiercely, a terror inherent to intimacy against which Tommy’s brazen, pointed persona is perfectly matched, but the clarity slips away just when it’s most needed.
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