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Doja Cat

Amala Dlamini has spent her career refusing to settle into a category, which is both the point of her and the recurring complaint about her. She raps seriously, sings seriously, and has repeatedly torched her own commercial positioning to make a record she wanted to make instead.

Early life and origins

Born in Los Angeles to a South African actor father and an American painter mother, and raised partly in an ashram in the Santa Monica mountains. She left school at sixteen and began uploading songs made in her bedroom to SoundCloud.

How she got started

"So High" got her signed to RCA as a teenager. "Mooo!", a deliberately absurd 2018 song about being a cow, went viral and made her a known quantity before any of her serious material had.

Album discography

Amala (2018), Hot Pink (2019), Planet Her (2021), Scarlet (2023) and Vie (2025), an eighties-leaning pop record that debuted at number four on the Billboard 200 and drew generally positive reviews for its synth-driven production.

Notable songs

"Say So", "Kiss Me More" with SZA, which won a Grammy, "Woman", "Paint the Town Red" and "Need to Know".

What she is known for musically

Technical versatility and a refusal to stay put. Planet Her was a pop-facing record, Scarlet was a deliberate turn toward harder rap after she publicly grew tired of the pop positioning, and Vie turned back again. She is a genuinely capable rapper who is frequently not taken as one because of how much else she does.

Public persona

She has repeatedly disrupted her own image — shaving her head and eyebrows in 2022, arguing with her fanbase in public, and rejecting the term "stan" outright. It has cost her audience at points and appears to be entirely deliberate.

The Scarlet turn

After Planet Her made her one of the biggest pop acts in the world, she publicly disowned the positioning, called some of her own hits uninteresting, and made Scarlet — a harder, rap-forward record with almost no pop concessions. It cost her a substantial share of the audience Planet Her had built, which appears to have been the intention.

Is she a rapper?

This gets argued constantly and the argument is mostly about category policing rather than ability. She raps in double-time, writes her own material, and has held her own opposite technical rappers on features. She also sings lead on pop records, which for some listeners disqualifies the first part.

Awards and chart record

"Kiss Me More" with SZA won Best Pop Duo/Group Performance at the 2022 Grammys. "Say So" and "Paint the Town Red" both reached number one on the Hot 100, the latter making her the first female rapper to top the chart with a solo song in several years.

Why this page moved

Her profile previously sat under the site's male rappers section, an error inherited from the old site's URL structure. It now sits where it belongs and the old address redirects here.