Sophia Michaels
Monaleo doesn’t subscribe to the age-old myth of motherhood being a career killer. When the 22-year-old Houston rapper found out she was pregnant with her first child late last year, she didn’t slow down her momentum. Instead, she tapped into “project mode” to record her highly anticipated debut LP, “Where the Flowers Don’t Die” (which dropped May 26), putting it together within eight months. Not just because she was anxious to deliver her formal music introduction to the world, but because she had someone new to look out for — “a reason to get sh*t done.”
“I was lazier before I was pregnant,” Monaleo tells POPSUGAR. “I felt like I wasn’t applying myself and I was comfortable in that space. But from the moment I got pregnant, immediately I was like, ‘It’s not about me anymore.’ I have a little life to cultivate and a little human to take care of. And I want to make sure that I create the best quality of life for them because I know I didn’t get that experience growing up. I want to make sure that they don’t have the same story that I had.”
“Not to be funny, but my life, it sounds like a story.”
So far, Monaleo has carved out a lane all on her own that’s taking her straight to the top. The Texas native, born Leondra Roshawn Gay, originally grew up singing in her church before she discovered her rap dreams, thanks to her younger brother, fellow rapper Yung Rampage. Since dropping her viral breakout hit “Beating Down Yo Block” in 2021, Monaleo’s been all-gas-no-brake, busying herself becoming Houston’s next big rap sensation.
Fiery singles like “We Not Humping,” “Body Bag,” and more led up to the release of Monaleo’s first full-length project, which coincidentally arrived just days after her firstborn, a baby boy, who wasn’t due until the very end of May. The “Ridgemont Baby” rapper calls the back-to-back milestones “very poetic,” though she wasn’t too surprised about the close timing.
“That’s just kind of how my life is,” she explains. “Not to be funny, but my life, it sounds like a story; like a fairy tale almost. So I really was not surprised that it happened like that because I have a very dramatic life. Sh*t just always happens [that] way.”
Another hint at Monaleo’s son’s early arrival might’ve been the fact that the new mom started dilating a month prior, at the same time she shot the music video for “Ass Kickin,” one of her project’s standout tracks. That didn’t make her pause, though: “I just wanted to keep going. I was super motivated.”
Motivation came easily to Monaleo during her project’s rollout. The recording process, however, was an uphill battle. “I felt like I was having writer’s block, so it was very difficult for me to figure out what I wanted to talk about,” Monaleo admits. She knew for sure, though, that she “didn’t want to be cliché” and make her pregnancy the focus of her LP: “I wanted it to be authentic to me at that time and what I was going through. What I was experiencing and all of those different emotions and crazy things that I was going through.”
“I could have easily been at home with my feet up. Would that have been beneficial for me? Probably not.”
In early May, Monaleo unveiled the title and vibrant floral cover art for “Where the Flowers Don’t Die” on social media, describing the LP as the “embodiment of resilience, tenacity, and strength.” The budding rap star tells POPSUGAR that it, in short, represents “what it means to be a strong, resilient woman.” For her, that looks like someone who’s battled depression, anxiety, and other mental health struggles while balancing a busy career. But Monaleo’s true resilience stems from completing “Where the Flowers Don’t Die” when she herself thought it wouldn’t happen.
