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Ever since Black evacuees of Hurricane Katrina carried New Orleans bounce to major cities of the South, traces of the dance-rap genre have infused popular music. But nothing gets the party crackin’ like the jittery soul of the real thing. After Katrina, OnlyHeaven’s family was split between New Orleans and Atlanta, but she stayed in her hometown with her dad, soaking up the energetic call-and-response chants of Katey Red and the rawness of Magnolia Shorty. Her pops was close with her older cousin Hot Boy Ronald, who dropped the local hit “Walk Like Ronald”—which sounds like the “Cha Cha Slide” if it got the Mannie Fresh touch—in the early 2000s. “Walk Like Ronald” integrated the “Triggerman” beat, a nickname for the flickering instrumental of ’80s Queens hip-hop group the Showboys’ “Drag Rap,” which is sometimes argued to have kicked off bounce when MC T. Tucker and DJ Irv chopped it up on 1991’s “Where Dey At.” That same signature sample opens up Heaven’s EP KISS (Keep It Short & Sweet), five screwball romantic comedy bounce joints made for the loudest sound systems.
Last year, the outrageously catchy “2 Shots” shotputted Heaven onto my radar. I was stuck on how it merged the dancefloor MCing of bounce pioneers with the raunchy storytelling favored by the current generation, and also the wicked flip of Michael Jackson’s “Man in the Mirror” vocals. A copyright strike forced her to remove that sample, a buzzkill because part of the spirit of bounce is in the way producers choose to let samples breathe or dice them up, endlessly reinterpreting older songs. Heaven and her producers don’t let that get them down on KISS, threading in samples across genres and using her imperfect, rasping bulldozer of a voice to sauce up throwback melodies. On “Never Hard,” big-time bounce producer Slash rolls an immediately familiar pop-punk guitar into scratches and twitchy drums, and Heaven is hollering a twist on a pop hook of the recent past: “Me and my hoes take niggas together, through the storm/No matter the weather, cold or warm.” It’s wild, though disconnected from the romanticism of the four other songs on KISS.
In a genre that revolves around singles, remixes, and DJ sets, KISS is loosely strung together by stories of falling in love so hard that the emotional whirlwind rivals a Bachelor contestant being picked on by the show producers. Throughout the tape, as the beats freak the hell out, Heaven drops in hilariously ridiculous ground rules for her man. On “No Friends,” he must drop all of his female childhood pals and disappear from the internet so no other girl can lay their plotting eyes on him. On “No Heart,” he must be willing to be taken to the afterlife in her name. All the scenes of love, horniness, or frustration start with her man either obeying her conditions or trying to weasel his way out of monogamy.
“No Friends” is also where Heaven’s head-over-heels madness hits overdrive. In the first verse she’s pampering her boyfriend with meals and designer shoes. In verse two, as the vocal sample curls around the pummeling drums, her storytelling evolves as she gets on her Sherlock Holmes shit and sniffs out his scheme: “You callin’ all these hoes your cousin, they be lookin’ real new/If it was your cousin, how come I’m never introduced?” She’s less stressed out on the flirty “Text.” Slash’s sputtering claps and iMessage dings backdrop Heaven’s shout-raps and church vocals as messages from her man turn her stomach into knots. That combination of bliss and lust takes them to bed on “So Much,” where producer Cmontank loops her emphatic “That’s why I love him so much when he fucking on me” with a bunch of airhorns. Less effective is the song’s softer intro—the ’90s R&B ballad rework doesn’t have the juice, especially compared to all of the vintage DJ Money Fresh R&B bounce mixes on YouTube that could melt your heart on command.
But KISS all comes together on “My Heart.” I could imagine Big Korey and Bridgez’s knocking yet smooth instrumental soundtracking the first dance at the wedding of your hard-living uncle who still dresses like he’s in The Gap Band. And Heaven’s raps navigate between funny (“Happy over here, showin’ all his teeth/We ain’t sharin’, he ain’t community meat”) and affectionate (“’Cause that’s my nigga, my heart/My nigga, my nerve”), while still working in those euphoric call-and-response lines that light up a crowd: “He messin’ with them hoes (No he not, no he not!)/He ain’t never let me go!” It’s funky, it’s intimate, it’s everything that has made bounce enduring party music both inside and outside New Orleans.
