Gunna – “One Call”
Last year, Atlanta rap upstarts and Young Thug proteges Lil Baby and Gunna got together to record Drip Harder, one of the year’s best rap albums. Baby and Gunna were both on the rise before that album, but now their twin upward trajectories have both gotten a lot sharper. Gunna, for instance, has been on tour with Travis Scott, and he’s been showing up on about a million other artists’ songs. And this morning, he’s come out with a new single of his own.
“One Call” is a showcase of the sort of rap music that Gunna loves to make: Muted, aqueous, built on its own sort of freeform internal logic. Gunna has a fast, darting delivery, but he always seems to be murmuring to himself, and he always finds the melody in what he’s doing. As a rapper, it can be hard to pick up on the threads connecting the things that he says, but he sounds good saying them: “My heart is torn / Shoot a movie like Berry Gordy / A star was born / My left wrist like a damn storm.” (With the sole exception of 1975’s Mahogany, Berry Gordy wasn’t a movie director! Maybe Gunna is just a big fan of The Last Dragon, like everyone else who’s ever seen The Last Dragon.)
“One Call” doesn’t have the chemistry or the immediacy of Gunna’s work with Lil Baby, but it does have a nicely woozy sense of float working for it. Check it out below.
“One Call” is out now on the streaming services.