At some point between her R&B-styled December 2023 project Release and Retribution and March 2024 rap mixtape Bad Guy, Lynn stopped giving a damn about naysayers. Musically, the Alabama native increasingly leaned into her “bad guy” moniker – a self-professed villain in the vein of a confident shit talker. On the title track for her latest release, Ten Thousand Hours, she exudes that heightened confidence, but immediately sprinkles in a reminder to remain resilient: “This life shit tough, but I’m a soldier, call me G.I. Jane.” Succeeding track “Slow Dreamz,” which currently counts over 425K views on her TikTok thanks to a mix of punchlines, interpolates Twista’s “Slow Jamz” with percussive elements of drill. Closing track “Hopeful” opens with a voice memo from her mother (her father raps on “Daddy’s Girls Interlude”) before offering yet another message of encouragement: “Show up for yourself. No matter what you do, don’t give up on you.” Lines of that variety don’t play as shallow platitudes dealt in an attempt to resemble a squeaky-clean hero – there’s still a healthy quantity of braggadocious bars on this eight-track project. These doses of motivation, however, feel authentic from someone who’s actively living out life’s twists and turns. The best villains are likable because they actually speak sensically.
This article appears in January 2 • 2026.