It somehow feels like both yesterday and a decade ago that Doja Cat lambasted her fans, told them to “get a job,” and lost nearly 250,000 Instagram followers. The road to Scarlet has been littered with potential blockades, but like a true feline, Doja Cat flexed her nine lives and turned the campaign for her new featureless album into a run that included not just her first unaccompanied Billboard Hot 100 chart-topper, but also the first hip-hop song to reach No. 1 on the chart in 2023.
The last time Doja put out a studio album, she went intergalactic. Wrapping in trap, Afrobeats, slinky R&B and sugar straightforward pop, Planet Her netted Doja a No. 2 peak on the Billboard 200, her first Grammy, and a litany of hits, including the SZA-assisted “Kiss Me More” (No. 3), “Woman” (No. 7), “Need to Know” (No. 8), “You Right” (No. 11, with The Weeknd), and “Get Into It (Yuh)” (No. 20).
Prior to that, the cross-genre marvel joined forces with Nicki Minaj for her first Hot 100 No. 1 single, “Say So” — a nu-disco quarantine anthem that helped launch both its parent album (Hot Pink) and Doja’s career to staggering new heights. In many ways, Scarlet — with its moody overtone and horrorcore-nodding aesthetic — is a response to the precariousness of those heights and the pressures they place on an artist who simply just wants to make music and find happiness in her life.
In many ways, Doja prepped Scarlet as a back-to-basics record that would focus on flaunting her skills as an emcee. She launched the era with the boom-bap-indebted “Attention,” doubled down on the pop-rap with the Dionne Warwick-sampling “Paint the Town Red,” and dabbled in punk-rap and lo-fi on promotional singles “Demons” and “Balut,” respectively. As a complete unit, Scarlet finds Doja flexing her muscle in different rap subgenres as she relies on a fiery new love to release from the twisted hamster wheel of the fanatic-artist dynamic. From jazz rap and punk rap to neo-soul and pluggnb, Doja is at the height of her chameleonic powers on Scarlet.
With a plethora of new songs to sort through and a tour on the horizon, which tracks are the true highlights of this record? Here is a preliminary ranking of every song on Doja Cat’s Scarlet, including the seven additional tracks making up the Scarlet 2 Claude deluxe.
