Two of Chicago’s young rap stars team up for some trash talk. Mello Buckzz is a 24-year-old from the East Side who first blew up in 2023 with Chicago posse cut “Mouskatool,” which she quickly renamed “Boom” to avoid beef with Mickey’s lawyers and remixed with a Latto feature. Star Bandz, 17 years old, signed a major label deal and performed at Lollapalooza with flossy, profanity-free verses she wrote in her bedroom in the south suburbs, “sitting here with my legs crisscrossed applesauce.”
On “Back Up On My Shit,” the two sink their teeth into a simple 808s-and-piano beat by JTK and Allday, the kind of thing that Gucci Mane would have annihilated in 2006, back when Buckzz was in kindergarten. Like fellow East Sider and past collaborator G Herbo, she raps ahead of the beat and squeezes four bars out of each rhyme. Mello might brag about putting the beef to the side on the hook, but when she sees an opp, she’s yanking her belt off to deliver an ass-whooping of the old school variety. Star raps like she’s trying to impress a big cousin at Thanksgiving. She uses an extended two-syllable rhyme to brag about “getting paid for halitosis” and swats away chauvinists with “I’m a girl but like I’m Smokey, I’m the man and you know this.” In the video Buckzz and Bandz alternate between messing around in the kitchen of a chicken restaurant and stunting in a blacked-out luxury car. It’s a great illustration of the way simple, hard tracks like this soundtrack the kitchens and loading docks of the world. I hope Mello and Star Bandz make another one every year.