Few stars burn as bright as Honey Bxby. When you look at the success she has amassed thus far, nothing was by chance, and she did it her way. “I manifested everything I have right now. When you really put your mind to something, things that you think are unattainable, you gotta convince yourself that you can have it. When it’s my time, when I become that superstar, it’s gonna look exactly how I look now, maybe a bit more glamorous. But very raw and real.” A New Jersey native, the multi-hyphenate singer-songwriter developed her talents from an early age. She began writing as a child, making music with her father, singing songs he would write for her. Even from young, Honey took music seriously. “I would use my own time to write little things, even down to my Grammy speeches. I wasn’t f*cking around. I stopped for a while as I got older and then once I hit high school, I took song writing more serious and really started to create music.” Raised on contemporary artists like Drake, Alicia Keys, and Kehlani, she spent hours studying their melodies, cadences, and lyrics. Inspired by their introspective approaches to storytelling and applied that to her writing style. “I take my time when I write. I make voice memos, so I don’t forget any flows. My laptop is filled with all these videos so I can record my writing process.” Honey would go on to begin performing privately to friends before uploading covers of songs online. A siren for the YouTube generation, Honey dropped her first song back in 2019 while simultaneously attending cosmetology school. While working, briefly, as an exotic dancer and on a hiatus from music, she was discovered through Instagram. “I made a rap song that I thought would be cool for the strip club and I wanted to see if I could even rap a little bit and I posted a Triller on Instagram. Someone seen my video, sent me a DM, asked what I was doing with my music, and if I had a team. The next day they wanted me to meet with K Mack.”
Merging disarming truthfulness with flesh-and-blood-sex appeal, her emotional honesty has garnered rising notoriety. Her singular soundscape blends serene, honey-laced vocals with unbridled and cold-blooded raps. Her sound can be described as “soft-hard-boy, very vulnerable but super hard.” On her debut EP, she flirts through genres with bullish command taking you through varying, relatable tales. “It’s like you broke my heart and I’m hurt but f*ck you. I have a song for every situation that someone has been through. Everyone reacts to my music in a relatable way.”
Like her predecessors, there is no veil. She prefers to hold nothing back from her fans, pushing past the stunted standards of fictive pop music, offering an unguarded autobiographical approach. On “Trouble”, she pairs a disarmingly delicate vocal performance with a set of lyrics that could diminish any bare-minimum boy’s ego.
“Trouble,” a surefire smash and powerful femme anthem, was created during one of the crucial points in Honey’s life. “When I did “Trouble,” it was like, we need one of those songs, I was still stripping, living in a 500 square foot apartment, I was on a hiatus. I was writing off the idea of niggas not being sh*t.” The gutturally charged, one-night anthem, “Touchin” further showcases her fluid range. “Touchin’ was one of those songs that I freestyled, and I was like what am I gonna write about? It was just a flow and I thought of telling a story about having a one-night stand. It was about being in the club, seeing a guy, a guy who wants to tap that ass, focused on one night of love.” In a sea of sameness, while the bulk of her peers are more concerned with aesthetics and manufactured personas, Honey’s self-contained authenticity is reassuring to a generation still forming the language around complex emotions and their own identities. Honey has a knack for using Instagram as a personal and unfiltered diary while encouraging her fans to be their most true selves. “There’s no persona, this is me all the time. I’m talking a lot of shit. I try to show myself. I just wanna inspire people to be the best versions of themselves. As an artist it’s not just about your music. It’s about your image, your personality, your character, all of that.”