Ten years ago, in 2014, DeJ Loaf seemed on the cusp of superstardom. The Detroit rapper broke out that year with “Try Me,” a syrupy hit where her angelic harmonies captivated us even as she unfurled threats to kill our whole “fomily.” After that, she jumped on Eminem’s “Detroit vs. Everybody,” then released platinum singles with Big Sean, Lil Durk, Kid Ink, and Future. She had the image and distinctive voice to become a rap heavyweight, but then her releases got more sparse. Until recently, she had only dropped a couple of singles in the previous four years.
End of Summer, the album she released on Oct. 11, shows she’s still got it. The self-professed studio rat tells me that though she’s been out of the public eye, she’s been recording all along, and a lot more music is coming.
“Honestly, I’m behind, so I’m just like, ‘Yo, I owe y’all this.’ It’s non-stop for me now,” she says. “I don’t want to just flood [the market], but we going to shower them with some good music. They definitely could look forward to getting about two, three more projects within the next year. I don’t plan on stopping, especially with the team I got now… People who care and are showing me that we can make some things happen.”
She’s not one for disclosing specifics of her personal life, but when I ask her the biggest lessons of her career, she says that some of her prior partnerships could’ve been more fruitful: “Watch who you hang around. [Be aware of] how everybody [says] they want to help or they want to be your friend. You just got to be mindful of your power.” She admits, “I lost myself a little bit letting other people drive and navigate my life. I learned to trust myself and not be naive. Had to relearn that.”
That contemplation came while quarantined at her Los Angeles home during the heat of Covid quarantine, a period she says was “awful.” The woman born Deja Trimble says she’s always been a loner, but life pausing magnified the personal qualms she was dealing with. Her debut LP, Sell Sole II, released in October 2020, received solid fan reception but failed to chart. “I feel like people weren’t able to receive the album well,” she reflects. The project dropped a year after her split with Columbia Records, a departure she deemed necessary after she says they stopped supporting her for reasons she still hasn’t ascertained. (A representative for the label did not respond to a request for comment.)
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Liberated, the album she’d been promising since at least 2016, was “pretty much done” when she was still signed to Columbia, according to her, but she didn’t understand what kept it from being released. “I was watching all my peers rise and get opportunities and I’m feeling like I’m getting left in the dirt,” she says — including “a lot of people that I came up with” essentially “leaving me for dead.”
She says her doldrums prompted breakdowns and “look in the mirror” moments where she asked herself, “What are you doing? We got to fix this.” But she refrains from getting specific about what those things were in our interview, noting that she’ll “talk about it one day.” DeJ says the period taught her to stop seeking external acceptance: “When you seek self, you find more within.” She also stopped comparing herself to other artists’ career trajectory, “because who says that you were supposed to be turned up before [another artist], or who said they’re going to be turned up forever?”
Armed with that mindset, she stayed focused on making music, eventually moving back to her hometown of Detroit in 2023. She reflects that Atlanta and L.A. felt a bit like home, but couldn’t compare to her native Motor City. “I feel like I experienced everything I needed to for the time that I did,” she says. “You got to bring it back home sometimes.”
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She’s still beloved in her home state. In July, she walked Flint-raised boxer Claressa Shields to the ring to raucous applause, performing “Try Me” before the undefeated pugilist knocked out opponent Vanessa Lepage-Joanisse in the second round. “I love being here,” she says. “I love being able to go out and it’s not a big deal. And the city has changed so much so it’s nice.”
DeJ Loaf has recorded multiple hard drives worth of music over the past five years, making for an arduous process of narrowing down songs for her next album. She says that sequencing End of Summer was so meticulous that Apple Music didn’t get the final version of the album until after midnight on release day. The project was initially titled Red Summer, then Beginning of Summer, but she eventually decided to align the title with the October release date and call it End of Summer. “I feel like this my season,” she declares. “Everybody’s ending the summer, grindin’ and cuddling up. It’s all those emotions.”
Those emotions are resonant throughout End of Summer. She’s a lover girl on the sultry “BNB/DTB,” getting “Faded” with 2Chainz, and telling listeners “they can’t fuck with you, you knowin’ you the shit” on the flashy “MIAMI FLOW.” The late album, two-song sequence of “Light It Up” and “Ride On Me” exemplifies the DeJ Loaf experience. The first song shows her crooning over an updated take on breezy ’90s R&B, while on the next track, she’s warning that “the whole hood’ll want you, like my last CD” if you cross her.
The album’s slew of collaborators mostly came about over the past year. DeJ had been looking for the best song to have Kash Doll get on, and decided the self-assured “Ladies Leave Your Man At Home” felt like the right one. She also tells me that album closer “Ball On My Side” is one of the album’s best storytelling moments, with herself, NoCap, Lil Poppa, and Hunxho getting introspective. Overall, End of Summer is a versatile collection of songs that show off the breadth of DeJ’s considerable — and in her eyes, overlooked — talent.
On album intro “Dangerous” she sings, “started a couple trends and I didn’t get recognition.” Indeed, many share the sentiment of Oakland rapper Kamaiyah, who in 2019 surmised, “DeJ loaf really got hella kids her style is the most duplicated in the game.” It’s facile to credit rap’s focus on melody, and the different approaches to it, to any one person. But a few artists have heavily added to the gumbo of modern rap, and DeJ Loaf’s early output, especially on tapes like Sell Sole and All Jokes Aside, put her in that kitchen. When it comes to being disregarded, DeJ theorizes that “people try to keep me as a hidden gem so they can continue to steal the sauce.” But she adds, “Then again, I don’t know, I can’t really call it. It makes me upset at times. I’ve grown past being bitter about it because I’m gonna keep doing what I do.”
Even if some people underestimate her influence, others agree with City Girls rapper JT, who once took to social media to sing “Try Me” and tell viewers, “I was raised on DeJ Loaf, I don’t know what y’all lil’ young soft ass hoes was raised on but bitch, this what I was raised on!” DeJ placed a clip of the video at the beginning of the album’s “GOOD A$$ DAY” with HBK.
JT speaks for a generation of fans who were entering early adulthood as DeJ Loaf first ascended in the industry. They were there when DAZED justifiably called her “the world’s most exciting new rapper.” DeJ Loaf’s lithe voice and gritty lyrics helped her excel in a rap world that’s always been obsessed with making menace seem playfully palatable. She possesses the appeal of 50 Cent’s early mixtape remixes, except she looks just as delicate as he looked diesel. It’s impossible to see the arena touring, chart-topping success of melodic artists like A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie, Rod Wave, and NBA Youngboy, and not see a world where DeJ would be right up there with them if her major-label experience had gone more ideally.
“I definitely saw [myself] having that longevity in the game,” she says. “I think people had expectations, but I think it got cut early for me” in terms of “trying to live up to that.” Ultimately, she concludes, “It’s hard to live up to people’s expectations. Got to live up to your own.”
One of the main themes of our conversation is DeJ not succumbing to what people want from her, including information about her personal life. In July, pictures surfaced of her in a club with her girlfriend, appearing to confirm longstanding rumors about her sexuality. “Everybody’s like, ‘I knew it, I knew it!’” she says. “And it’s like, ‘Duh.’ That’s the same thing I was saying. I knew it, too.” In 2015, when asked about her preference, she told BET, “It is what it is.” She says she’s been annoyed by how onlookers have speculated about her romantic life. ”I just felt like people have this thing [of] trying to narrate,” she says. “I let them narrate who I was for too long. And they still don’t know… I’m comfortable with who I am.”
If only others were as well. Society is still too heteronormative, and someone like DeJ, whose fashion sense coalesces femininity with subtle machismo, confounds people who still conflate gender identity with sexuality. DeJ explores romance in her music, which makes fans entitled to know who she may be talking about. Undeterred, she’s rarely sought to feed fans the mythography they crave. Way back in 2015, she told Fader, “Everybody’s poking, but I just feel like the things they want to know are the smallest parts about me.”
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Secure in herself, DeJ wants to advocate for everyone to accept themselves, and for society to be accepting of others. “It’s being yourself,” she says. “I think a lot of people suffer from feeling like they have to be a certain way because of their masculinity and their femininity.“ She adds, “You don’t have to feel crazy about wanting to do your nails if you’re a masculine woman. And the same for men too.”
DeJ wants to be that beacon for young girls — and she promises to do so via a more steady stream of music. Along with her own music, she says she’d like to explore songwriting for others. And she’s also working on developing artists, including two of her cousins who form the appropriately titled duo My Cousins. “I think I have a bigger purpose outside of this. That’s why I stopped worrying,” she says. “I used to be so depressed about my career and it’s like, ‘No, forget this.’ I never want to be sad about music again. That’s not what music is for. That’s not what I started it for.”