Is Sugar Honey Iced Tea a thinly veiled backronym directed at a fellow female rapper? Not according to Latto: “This is something that just felt Southern to me,” she demurred last month. Mirroring this brand-friendly regionalism, Sugar is built around aggressively adequate Atlanta trap anthems and functionally anonymous readymades that only occasionally reflect the full force of Latto’s talent. These songs do not demand to be played—they ask not to be skipped.
This is particularly frustrating given the strength of Latto’s singles over the past year. While her biggest hits to date are the wedding-ready pop confection “Big Energy” and last summer’s Jung Kook collaboration “Seven,” Latto has simultaneously been cutting some of her toughest tracks ever, popping out with newcomer Anycia on “Back Outside” and threatening to pull up with “20 black Suburbans” full of goons on “Sunday Service.” Latto has said Sugar Honey Iced Tea was inspired by her 2023 song “Put It on Da Floor,” which “sparked a whole new energy for me as an artist.” Yet both “Put It on Da Floor” and “Sunday Service” are relegated to bonus track status (alongside their star-studded remixes). That energy is sorely missed: When Sugar Honey Iced Tea tries to come across brusque and threatening on would-be Playboi Carti song “Blick Sum,” it feels silly rather than savage.
Silly isn’t a terrible look for Latto, whose simple rhymes are often delivered with an exaggerated wink. Take “Brokey,” where she says she’s sick of Givenchy Shark Lock boots (“Y’all burnt ’em out”), or the Young Nudy-assisted standout “Shrimp & Grits,” which kicks off, “Squirting on a nigga, he drinking my piss/Freak bitch, make him swallow my spit.” She rarely drops proper nouns, zoomed in on cash, carats, and an amorphous array of men eager to please. And although she’s quick to tease a hater that their boyfriend could be hers, Latto’s raps stay playful enough that even when she tosses off a line like “Body count so low, I might say I’m a virgin,” it scans as sardonic rather than slut-shaming.
But long stretches of Sugar Honey Iced Tea are devoid of Latto’s peculiar charms. Tracks with Coco Jones and Teezo Touchdown could blend into any major label rap release; album outro “S/O to Me” aspires to be corny like Drake and sort of succeeds. Uglier still is a raft of populist tracks aimed at Top 40 and Rap Caviar. The former include Ciara feature “Good 2 You,” which exists, and a Megan Thee Stallion collaboration that manages to sound like a K-pop B-side without involving a single pop artist; the latter include the ponderous “Settle Down” and lackluster cuts like “Liquor” and “H&M,” where Latto’s impassioned vocals can’t fully zhuzh up run-of-the-mill beats. These lowest-common-denominator plays are a slog on an already too-long album.
