You’ve Got It All Wrong About Doja Cat
The singer, rapper and provocateur pushes herself to the max. On her new LP, “Vie,” that means leaning into her pop roots and “doing what I know I know how to do.”
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By Joe Coscarelli
Visuals by Chantal AndersonSept. 5, 2025Updated 10:08 a.m. ET
Doja Cat likes to make things difficult.
That impulse is, in part, a reaction to the fact that so much has seemed to come pretty easily for the Los Angeles rapper and singer as she bloomed into one of the defining pop stars of the 2020s: crowd-pleasing radio smashes, sold-out tours, 19 Grammy nominations and one of the more detailed-obsessed, battle-ready fan bases — known as “kittenz” — in modern music.
To counter the gloss that has coated her commercial sound and career ascent, the Doja Cat way is to always be asking why, with bite and some belligerence. Such flare-ups, often ignited by the artist herself, tend to implicate both Doja and her admirers equally, leaving a crater in the conversation that she must then lift herself out of; some in the blast radius might get left behind, but that’s probably the point.
Amala Ratna Zandile Dlamini (born October 21, 1995), known professionally as Doja Cat (/ˈdoʊdʒə/), is an American rapper, singer, songwriter and record producer. A genre-blending artist, she is often dubbed the "Queen of Pop-Rap".[1] She began making and releasing music on SoundCloud as a teenager. Her song "So High" caught the attention of Kemosabe and RCA Records, with whom she signed a recording contract prior to the release of her debut extended play, Purrr! (2014).
After a hiatus from releasing music and the uneventful rollout of her debut studio album, Amala (2018), Doja Cat earned viral success as an internet meme with her 2018 single "Mooo!", a novelty song in which she makes humorous claims about being a cow. Capitalizing on her growing popularity, she released her second studio album, Hot Pink, in the following year. The album eventually reached the top ten of the US Billboard 200 and spawned the single "Say So"; its remix with Nicki Minaj topped the US Billboard Hot 100. Her third studio album, Planet Her (2021), spent four weeks at number two on the Billboard 200 and became the 10th best-selling album globally of 2021. It produced the top ten singles "Kiss Me More" (featuring SZA), "Need to Know", and "Woman". Her fourth studio album, Scarlet (2023), adopted a hip-hop-oriented sound and peaked within the top five of the Billboard 200. Its lead single "Paint the Town Red" became her most successful song to date, as it marked her first solo number-one on the Hot 100, her first number-one on the Billboard Global 200, and topped charts internationally.
Named by Vibe as one of the five greatest live performers of the 2020s and the greatest outside the R&B genre,[2] by Revolt as one of the 15 greatest live performers of all time,[3] and by GQ as the "reinventor of the award show performance",[4] Doja Cat is known for her versatility, live performing skills and stage presence.[5] Well-versed in Internet culture, she is also famed for her absurdist online personality, being often referred to as the "Queen of Memes" by numerous major publications.[6] Her accolades include a Grammy Award from 19 nominations, six Billboard Music Awards, five American Music Awards, and five MTV Video Music Awards. Billboard named her one of the world's biggest pop stars and the 24th top woman artist of the 21st century.[7][8] She was listed by Time as one of the world's most influential people in 2023.[9]
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Doja Cat likes to make things difficult.
That impulse is, in part, a reaction to the fact that so much has seemed to come pretty easily for the Los Angeles rapper and singer as she bloomed into one of the defining pop stars of the 2020s: crowd-pleasing radio smashes, sold-out tours, 19 Grammy nominations and one of the more detailed-obsessed, battle-ready fan bases — known as “kittenz” — in modern music.
To counter the gloss that has coated her commercial sound and career ascent, the Doja Cat way is to always be asking why, with bite and some belligerence. Such flare-ups, often ignited by the artist herself, tend to implicate both Doja and her admirers equally, leaving a crater in the conversation that she must then lift herself out of; some in the blast radius might get left behind, but that’s probably the point.
The songs that brought Doja all of this attention, for example — hits like “Say So,” “Kiss Me More” and “Woman,” from the albums “Hot Pink” and “Planet Her” — were just “cash-grabs and yall fell for it,” she once wrote on social media. “Now i can go disappear somewhere and touch grass with my loved ones on an island while yall weep for mediocre pop.” As for her most engaged supporters? If you identify as a kitten, Doja has suggested, you should probably “get off your phone and get a job.”
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A very online 29-year-old technology addict, the musician born Amala Dlamini is trolling, usually — but she means it, too. Trailed since her 2019 breakthrough by a string of these micro-controversies — the bouts of brutal honesty but also her stubborn, subversive allegiance to so-called racial chat rooms and edgelord T-shirt choices — Doja Cat appears to find personal and artistic fuel in sparring, especially when shadowboxing with the mirror.
“I listen to so much good music, and when I do that, I beat myself up and think that my music should be better,” she said behind blackout shades at her home in Calabasas, Calif., in between heated rounds of Fortnite on the big screen. “I remember making all those songs for ‘Planet Her’ and ‘Hot Pink’ and being like, ‘I don’t wanna listen to this.’”
“I’m doing things that people like,” she thought in recent years, “and I’m glad that they enjoy it. But now, I am going to veer off the edge of the [expletive] cliff, and do whatever I want to do, and listen to my intrusive thoughts,” she added, “in order to make me feel like I’m doing something productive for myself and not just the brand.”
The resulting follow-up album, the rap-heavy “Scarlet” from 2023, was supposed to be a corrective. Darker, more personal and shot through with the defensiveness of an M.C. who was sick of her technical skills being questioned, the album was less successful than the two before it, but still went platinum and delivered a No. 1 single, “Paint the Town Red.” For Doja, even a swerve proved popular.
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More crucially, though, “Scarlet” taught Doja Cat that the chip on her shoulder was permanent. “Not to diminish it, but it was a bit of like, I just need to get this out — it was a massive fart for me,” she said of her attempt to be taken more seriously. “I thought fixing that would entail making music that was more visceral or more emotional or maybe more angry or more sad. And I enjoyed performing it onstage, but it didn’t get me all the way there. So I want to return back to what I know.”
And what Doja Cat knows are old-fashioned hits.
On “Vie,” her fifth album, out Sept. 26, the pop star is strutting back into the broadest of tents and hitting a split in a bedazzled leotard. Marrying the sleazy side of ’80s synths and up-tempo R&B (Prince, Janet) with the confidence and visual bombast of “cock-rock” glam — think Mötley Crüe, Poison, Kiss, “not that I even really listen to them, necessarily” — songs like “Take Me Dancing” and “Jealous Type,” the album’s lead single, are unabashed and unpretentious, even if they pull from a deeper reference bucket than the sparkly surface lets on.
“It’s overtly sexy and it becomes kind of silly, which is likable and fun,” Doja said. “I just always want to keep that sense of fun, but I never want to be too goofy.” She cited Nina Hagen, the German cabaret-punk throwback, as another inspiration — “a hot girl who isn’t trying to just be a hot girl,” Doja explained. “She has layers to her.”
Featuring production for the first time by the pop polymath Jack Antonoff, alongside Doja Cat’s go-to lineup of lesser-known studio hitmakers (Y2K, Kurtis McKenzie), “Vie” — French for life — is very much “a continuation of ‘Planet Her’ and ‘Hot Pink,’” she said. “I’m doing what I was perfecting in the beginning. I’m doing what I know I know how to do.”
McKenzie, who has worked on every Doja Cat album, said in an interview that the singer was “definitely battling something” over the last few years that needed purging. “When you do something so effortlessly, sometimes you want to move away from that,” he said.
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The recording process for “Vie,” on the other hand, found Doja “more openhearted” when it came to “making music that other people can enjoy, she can enjoy, and it not being so heavy,” McKenzie added, noting that Doja once again wanted to show off her voice and perform the role of pop star. “‘Scarlet’ allowed her to miss that.”
The scale of the singer’s ambitions were clear a decade ago. “She was very, very confident about where she was going,” McKenzie recalled, even when the producer Yeti Beats — who signed Doja Cat to Dr. Luke’s Prescription Songs and Kemosabe label — used to “pick her up from her mom’s house in his Prius” to come make music at their shared studio space. “The vision was to be a huge artist.”
It doesn’t take long around Doja Cat to realize that the anarchic looseness of her online persona, and her self-described “brain-rot humor,” belie a certain ruthlessness. In real life, Amala is to Doja what Tina Fey is to Liz Lemon: the shrewd, exacting string-puller that allows audiences to confuse the character’s mess for its creator’s. You only know the exaggerated quirks, it turns out, because of a type-A master plan.
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