Chance the Rapper’s new Coloring Book is expected to land on the Billboard 200 soon based on streaming plays alone—it’s an Apple Music exclusive for another week or so yet. He’s not the only rising Chicago rapper on the charts, though. South-side native Dreezy has been steadily climbing the Hot 100 (among several others) thanks to the January single “Body.” With her hard raps and sultry singing, she broke out after the February 2014 release of her Schizo mixtape; by the end of the year, she’d collaborated a couple times with Common, lit up a BET Hip-Hop Awards cypher, and landed a deal with Interscope. Her 2015 studio debut, the EP From Now On, featured some attention-grabbing contributors—Detroit MC Dej Loaf pops up on “Serena,” and Southside and Metro Boomin produced the whole thing—but Interscope severely undermined its potential by releasing it a day before Christmas. (It did reach number ten on Billboard‘s Heatseekers chart in January.)
Dreezy dropped the non-EP single “Body” just two weeks after From Now On came out, and it’s been performing better as the days have gotten warmer. The track first appeared on the Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart in March, and it’s turned up on nine more Billboard charts—including the Hot 100, where it’s currently at number 72. Dreezy released a video for “Body” late last week—she and guest vocalist Jeremih sing their come-ons in the middle of a jammed party—so the song may not have peaked yet.
Part of what makes “Body” great is its recontextualization of familiar pop tropes. Its glossy, quasi-tropical electronic melody sounds like it was borrowed from a pulse-pounding dance-pop track and then slowed down to a purr. Dreezy reframes a slang phrase for murder that’s frequently used in trap songs—that is, “catch a body”—so that it refers instead to finding company for the night. She turns a familiar threat into something more sultry than sinister, and her assured, impassioned performance marks her as an artist to watch out for.
