Latto Prayed for This

Latto is feeling good these days.

“This is me at my most confident,” she tells PAPER. She’s currently in Miami, putting the finishing touches on her upcoming album Big Mama amid much change in her life. “I’m in my happiest space, at the most peace I've experienced in my 27 years of life — whew, 27, I almost forgot how old I was!”

Her forgetfulness is easily forgivable. Since she emerged as the 16-year-old victor of the reality TV competition The Rap Game, the last decade or so has accelerated at warp speed. She’s released three studio albums, performed all over the world and collaborated with everyone from Mariah Carey to BTS’s Jung Kook. Plus, she has a little extra to focus on as of late.

“Forgive me,” she laughs. “Pregnancy brain!”

Latto, born Alyssa Stephens, never anticipated that she’d be expecting a baby during the build-up to an album cycle. “I always thought when I got pregnant one day, I was gonna fall back and be out the way,” she says. But when she found herself staring down at a positive pregnancy test, she was already in the middle of creating what she calls her “masterpiece.”

The new album, scheduled to come out May 29, was already going to be named after the playfully braggadocious alter ego that spawned from Latto’s last album Sugar Honey Ice Tea and its GRAMMY-nominated single “Big Mama.” She never stopped recording after releasing Sugar Honey Ice Tea in 2024, constantly tinkering away at ideas for her next project in the studio before the shape of it had even become clear. All the while, she’s continued to stack collaboration after collaboration with artists including 21 Savage (“POP IT”), Ice Spice (“Gyatt”), LUDMILLA and Emilia (“BOTA”) and Cardi B (“ErrTime”).

Her feature on Summer Walker’s “Go Girl” with Doja Cat produced the latest in a long list of the viral and addictive catchphrases she’s become known for: “Big mama, no kids,” she raps, “Waiting for the right nigga, right time.”

“I’ve been waiting to speak on that!” Latto immediately giggles at the mention of the song. “I recorded that verse almost two years ago. I was not pregnant! I’m not a cap-ass bitch. Let me clear that up.”

In her typical fashion, Latto is hesitant to talk about the first half of the “Go Girl” lyric.

Despite having referenced her romantic relationship publicly for years in both interviews and in songs, she has never explicitly named her beau and soon father-to-be. Naturally, that doesn’t stop the public from treating his identity like an open secret, but she’s unfazed by the commentary. “I have nothing to prove to anyone. I have no rumor to clear up,” she says. “I've been with my man for years now, and it ain't going nowhere. To me, that's clearly a result of me moving and operating how I do.”

“When it comes to female rappers, female artists — we're told that we have to put so much of our life out there, and then it becomes too much about our personal life and not enough of the music,” Latto explains. “That's how stuff just ends up crashing and burning, because you got too many cooks in the kitchen. I'm my own person outside of my relationship as well. I don't want to make that the forefront of my existence, my career. I got a man at home, I'm happy and I'm well taken care of, and that's about all anyone needs to know.”

For an artist as high-spirited and often freely vulnerable as Latto, the strictness with which she continues to enforce this particular boundary is striking. After all, this is the same woman who shared openly about her cosmetic surgeries and subsequent regrets, and who once flipped a cruel internet joke about her rewearing underwear into a viral online auction and a merch line of cheetah print thongs. But when it comes to the most valuable things in her life, Latto is only interested in letting you get as close as her music will allow.

She plans to extend her policy of privacy to motherhood. “It's all new territory for me. I'm preparing myself mentally for people to have so much to say once I do officially announce that I am pregnant and expanding my family. But I don't think I'm going to be willing to share much more than I already have. If anything… the most expressive or vulnerable I'll get when it comes to my personal life will be in the music. Outside of that, you probably won't see much.”

I ask what made this feel like the right time. “God just spoke to me,” she says with a sigh. “I felt like this is what's supposed to happen at this time of my life right now, and I just leaned into it.” She’s been spending her time surrounded by a close circle of friends, family, and collaborators who call her ‘Lyssa, sticking to a steady routine of acai bowls, green juice, prenatal vitamins, light exercise, plenty of sleep and plenty of studio sessions. The strength of her support system is part of why she’s been able to stave off the anxieties that highly ambitious women often face when they’re expecting.

“I was definitely terrified of what everyone was going to think and, you know, those stigmas, that [motherhood] is gonna slow you down,” she says. “But I feel like I'm more motivated than I've ever been in my life. I was so worried in the beginning, and I literally laugh at how worried I was now. I can't imagine my life today being any other way. It’s like it was written.”

Latto’s excitement to be a mother is palpable as she tells me about the scrapbook she’s been working on for her baby. “I'm documenting my whole pregnancy in this book for them to see one day,” she describes. “I'm not even being secretive when I say ‘them’ — I don’t know! We decided from the jump we was gonna make [the gender] a surprise.” She’s been reflecting on her own upbringing often as her due date approaches, feeling her gratitude for her parents evolving and growing from a new perspective. She credits them both for her work ethic, ambition, morals, faith, and groundedness. “Now that I'm about to be a parent, there’s so much that my parents instilled in me that I'm going to just carry on with my child.”

Latto was 8 years old when she decided that she wanted to be a rapper. Born in Columbus, OH and raised in Atlanta, GA against the backdrop of the music industry, some of her earliest memories were of accompanying her father to studio sessions and music video sets. When Latto told him she wanted to pursue music, she says her father sat her down to give her a stern warning about hard work. “He was like, ‘you know, this isn’t playtime. If you gonna do this, you got to do it for real.’ And from that point on, it was full-blown career mode.”

By the time she released her first official mixtape as a teen after winning The Rap Game — and turning down its grand prize of a recording contract — Latto had already cultivated a relationship to her goals that most people take a lifetime to develop. She understood that nothing was an accident, and nothing was insurmountable: that if she worked hard enough, consistently enough, the universe would make way for her. When PAPER first spoke to her in 2020, she put it simply: “When you see me, when you feel me, when you see me perform and feel my energy, you feel that hunger.”

The Latto of today is almost unrecognizable by comparison; her glam has changed, her sounds have progressed and diversified, and she answers interview questions with the reticence of a more experienced public figure. Simultaneously, small hints of her influences and past ideas still peek through, like the OutKast sample on her last album (“Good 2 You” ft. Ciara) that echoes a song called “OutKast” from her very first mixtape. Over a decade into her career, she has built up enough of a catalog to start self-referencing, even without always meaning to.

Now, there is a lighter assuredness to the rapper’s ambitious energy and the music she’s been making. “I feel like I'm making the best music of my life, with this clear mind and these clear thoughts,” she describes. “I've made the majority of this album sober, obviously, so I feel like I've been able to take a deep dive within my own thoughts and creativity and come into a more connected relationship with myself. It's translating through the music in the coolest way ever — you can hear where my headspace is. I'm super vulnerable and super experimental.”

“I have this lucky whiteboard that I've been using in the studio,” she tells me, almost giddily. “I’ve just been writing on this big ol’ whiteboard, and going in the booth with my little Expo marker and everything, just putting more thought into my lyrics and song concepts. I feel like you can hear the maturity, the growth.”

The image of Latto with her lucky whiteboard sticks after our conversation. It feels symbolic of the vein of earnest effort and study that has been constant throughout her career. The whiteboard is versatile. The whiteboard allows for drafting, for correction, for sharpening, for improving. The whiteboard is simultaneously a symbol of humility and of urgency, of action, of greatness’s lack of patience for the stubborn ego.

Perhaps the single most compelling trait of Latto’s trajectory has been her willingness to pivot, to reinvent, to implement feedback, and, crucially, to incorporate that process of growth into her music and public persona. When she changed her stage name in 2021 after fans and critics alike expressed offense at the historical roots of her original stage name “Mulatto,” she rapped about the experience in the comeback single “The Biggest”: “I'll be damned if the name the reason I don't make it / It contradicted what I stand for / The backlash ain't what I planned for / Now I know better, so I'm movin' better.” But despite how seriously she takes her career, Latto’s most charming attribute is how unseriously she takes herself.

Simply put, she’s having fun.

Latto has mastered the ineffable quality that seems to elude so many artists and isn’t even part of the aims of others, but is undeniably a necessary category in any healthy musical diet; she makes you feel good even when you don’t want to. By feel good, I don’t mean to reduce her music to simply making one feel like a boss or a baddie, though she does that too, following in the tradition of some female rap’s core thematic prerequisites. No, I mean like, she makes you feel good. She makes you laugh in the middle of trying to mean mug. Her best lyrics are the ones that make you break a sexy scowl and giggle. Her most memorable, viral lines are the ones that are taken up with a sense of humor, with a relentless mirth and insistence on enjoying yourself. “Rip me out the plastic, I been actin brand new.” “What do I get for my birthday?” “Big mama, no kids.”

“Business and Personal (Intro)” makes sure to let the listener know she’s still having a good time. “I was very particular about not wanting this to be lame and like hella mature to the point where it feels like, dang, she not Latto no more,” she clarifies. “Like, nah, bitch, I'm still big mama. I just got a belly on me!” With a beat change halfway through the track and plenty of her familiar wordplay and flow switches, she says the song represents the tone of the next era — one where the lines between her art, her job, and her personal life are perhaps more blurred than she’s used to.

“I prayed when I was in the early stages of this album, still trying to find that creative pocket,” Latto tells me, her voice getting softer. “I prayed for inspiration. I remember I kept praying like, God, I need something, I need some new motivation, I’ve been doing this for so long, I need to be re-inspired. I need something to make me go hard. Little did I know that there was gonna be a baby on the way. God is always listening. It’s not gonna always be what you expect, but He’s listening.”