For Anycia, Rap Stardom Is as Simple as Being Herself

The New York-based seafood restaurant Hav & Mar features a contemporary interior design and elaborate artwork of Black mermaids lining the walls. On a recent afternoon, the restaurant’s renowned celebrity chef Marcus Samuelsson isn’t around, but Atlanta rapper Anycia is here with her small entourage, including close collaborator and producer jetsonmade. Over the past year, the 26-year-old has rapidly risen with the vibrant personality and entrancing baritone that many people first heard during her On the Block performance of “BRB.” Anycia tells me that her prevailing memory of the moment is her fashion choice. “I looked so cute,” she raves about her white dress. “I could watch it on mute. I love that dress. I wish I could wear it again, but it went viral. That’s really what I thought about. When it went viral, I was like, ‘Damn, I can’t never wear that dress again.’”

That candor is why people are coming to love Anycia, the kind of extroverted, down-to-earth woman who reminds so many rap fans of the free spirits they know in real life who are always the life of the party — but just might end things early if she has to slap the hell out of someone. Those girls might be the main fan base tapping into Princess Pop That, her debut album releasing tomorrow. Fittingly, she tells me that she didn’t overthink the 14-track project’s creative conception. 

“It wasn’t no process,” she assures. “I be trying not to sound out of touch when I be saying this. But all of this that I’m doing is me being my 100 percent full self. It’s not no deep story. It’s literally like, ‘I was going through that at the time.’’” She says that was the case with her breakout, Latto-featured track “Back Outside” “My nigga [had] made me mad for real. I’m really ‘Back Outside’ for real. Some girls will get mad at they nigga and make a song,” she says before jokingly singing a fictional song about heartbreak. “But me, it’s like, ‘Fuck that nigga. Where that money at? We goin’ outside bitch, with shorts on. We outside dancin’ at [Club QT].’” 

“Back Outside” starts with jetsonmade’s churning horns, which scream Atlanta — they sound ripe for Jeezy, Gucci Mane, or T.I. to hop on talking their king-of-the-trap shit. But Anycia’s sultry voice makes it a different affair, offering the woman’s perspective to the typical “all the money, all the women” rapper story: “Nigga done made me mad again,” she laments, before rapping, “Popped out with a brand new dude/Popped out with a brand new team/Walked in, smell good, I’m tea.” But she tells me it wasn’t always easy for her to exude self-confidence. ”I was a kid that was shy. My little-girl self is beyond proud of me,” she says. 

Anycia was born on the south side of Atlanta, where she grew up with her grandmother, mother, and younger brother. She was exposed to a balance of music during her childhood years, with her grandmother listening to classic soul artists such as Luther Vandross and Teena Marie, and her mother playing Usher and Ciara. She says that during her elementary school years ”I was the personality. It was so bad, a teacher moved my desk to the front of the class because I was bad and I thought I ran the class.” Her first raps were about Jesus; fellow churchgoers saw her natural vibrance and made her the star of their musical. “I had my own solo,” she says. “I bust out of a back room with a bubble coat on and they had me rapping.“

She spent time in various parts of Atlanta and a year in New Orleans, where members of her family ran a mental-health facility, working to treat people of all ages.  Sipping on a custom-crafted tequila drink, she says that spending the start of her adolescence in New Orleans “put the fight in me,” as being the new kid in an unfamiliar city made her a mark for other students to attempt to pick on. 

“You got that group of people that want to play with you,” Anycia recalls. “Now we got to fight.” Her adolescent years were contentious and fluid; she never attended the same school consecutively except for a two-year stint between sixth and seventh grade. There was even a stint in 10th grade where she went to three schools during the same year, including two alternative schools (“I was on a behavior contract and I kept fucking it up”). 

And while that period spurred a lot of fisticuffs, she reflects that it’s what’s made her so adaptable. “I feel like everything that has transpired in my life were lessons. Moving around was definitely one of them. [That period] was teaching me to never get too comfortable in a certain environment.” She raves that now “I’ve learned to walk in a room. It could be a thousand people I don’t know, and I can dominate the whole room. I can break the ice because I’ve become so comfortable with myself.”

Her natural comedic chops are evident when our convo meanders into broke X users and parents who are overly reliant on tablets to pacify their child. You get why her friend and “Splash Brothers” collaborator Karrahboo has previously noted “she makes me happy.” While Anycia seems like a natural star, entertainment wasn’t her first passion. Anycia recalls wanting to be a veterinarian, a photographer for forensic investigators, or a mental-health professional. “I love people and I love animals,” she says. “I would see kids’ whole demeanor change [in the mental-health facility] as soon as they were in the room with love.”

As she got older, she became more well-known around certain Atlanta scenes, and grew up with Atlanta rappers like KEY! and Unotheactivist, but says their success never pushed her to make music — though she occasionally dabbled. After a short stint in barber school, she pursued her love of working with kids while she was a teacher at a day care, and she also moonlighted as a hostess at a club on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays. Her schedule was lucrative, but it wasn’t fulfilling, and eventually, she crashed. 

“One day I just quit both jobs and I was like, ‘Sayonara baby. I got to do what I want to do,’” she says. “I swear to God, I sat in my closet and I just cried. I was like, ‘I can’t do this forever. I’m not happy.’ The only aspiration I ever have in life is not to be the richest woman in the world or nothing like that. My only aspiration in life is to be comfortable and happy.”

Her savings were dwindling, her car was failing and needed weekly oil changes, but she was determined to make something shake. She spent her last money on studio time and prayed for signs that music was the correct path, and they steadily came in through choice encounters with people who helped further her career. After she posted a trailer of the music video for “BRB,” producer jetsonmade posted it and lauded her potential. “After that we locked in,” Anycia says. “We started doing music together and everything went from here.” She credits him for his music advice as well as helping her with music videos. 

She also crafted “So What” during that period, a Popstar Benny-produced song for which she filmed a low-frills video. “Child, I had on a crooked wig, a Walmart bikini, some tequila, a GoPro, and a dream. We had us a good time,” she says of the October 2023 visual, which quickly went viral. “I woke up one day, it was getting hella views, and Kevin Durant [shared it]. I was like, ‘What the fuck? Y’all like this shit?’” The people liked it so much that it led to her becoming an opener on Veeze’s 2023 Ganger tour. A month later, she dropped Extra, a six-song EP featuring “BRB,” the frenetic “Refund,” and a slew of songs like “Big Body” and “Drop Top,” where her smoky voice seeps out over smooth production.

That vibe carries over to her debut album, with songs such as “EAT!,” “Call,” with Luh Tyler, and “That’s Hard,” with Cash Cobain, making it the kind of smooth listen that fits into a playlist of hustler braggadocio, except it’s the woman on her boss shit. “Nene’s Prayer” isn’t a continuation of her first rap at church, it’s an anguished text block of a track with well-wishes like “I hope you get up out the car, and then your phone crack.” Her nomadic experience is apparent in the sonics, as there are elements of Atlanta and Detroit in the production, especially on “Type Beat” and “Up, Lit.” The album further entrenches her as one of the “rap girlies” who make music for the turn-up as well as chill vibes. She’s already mastered her sound, but she tells me that the refinement is a self-involved process. 

“I do love to know what [fans] like, but this is my shit,” she says. “Don’t ever forget that y’all like me because I was being me in the beginning. It’s like they going to like it anyway because I didn’t pop out trying to be somebody else. I popped out being myself. Like I said, that’s the easiest job.”