Monaleo was feeling discouraged. “I was struggling with getting started on certain songs, I didn’t know what to say,” she says. She was in the studio but stuck in her head, chewing over the comment section: “You just read some shit about yourself and you’re like, ‘Damn, nobody even really fucking with me for real.’”

Casual fans best acquainted with Monaleo’s all-synapses-firing freestyles, take-no-shit anthems like “We Not Humping” might find this admission surprising. But the 23-year-old rapper born Leondra Gay has always been candid about her mental health in songs and interviews, from shaking with fear during church choir performances as a child to surviving multiple suicide attempts in her teens. And 2023 was a busy year for Leo: Her debut album, Where the Flowers Don’t Die, arrived just days after the birth of her son. Another artist might cut themselves some professional slack, but Monaleo holds herself to an exactingly high standard. It pisses her off to go in the studio and feel like she’s spinning her wheels.

You can hear a bit of that rage on her new mixtape Throwing Bows, an exhilarating return to form for lovers of “Ass Kickin’” and “Ranchero.” Whether dispensing tough love for women dating losers (“Flush Em”) or going onomatopoetic bar for bar with H-Town favorite Sauce Walka (“Ee-er”), Big Leo is back in a major way, balancing bottles on her head and making fiancé Stunna 4 Vegas “put some Jibbitz in his Crocs.”

Last year’s Where the Flowers Don’t Die could skew vulnerable or sentimental, though that didn’t always land: “People were not very receptive to that, and that’s fine,” she says. “I don’t have to even share that part of my life.” By comparison, Throwing Bows is as hard-hitting and pitiless as its prize-fighting cover suggests, all uppercuts and body blows. “I do channel a part of myself where I was in that phase where I was really just completely dogwalking n****s. That’s the space a lot of people live vicariously through me for,” she shrugs. “If people want to hear that breaking n**** shit, I can give it to them pretty much every day for the rest of my life.”

This shouldn’t be mistaken for Monaleo pandering to the masses. If anything, she’s gotten more hands-on and eclectic with her instrumentals. “I feel like everything is starting to run together now… Everything that’s being pushed is so similar. I wanted something that was going to cut through,” she explains. “And my ideas cut through. Always, every time.”

Throwing Bows accordingly balances carefree club knockers with aggro bangers like the Rebirth-esque “Queen & Slime” and the Baby Kia-featuring “Wam Bam,” the latter of which twists the violins from “Toxic” into a horrorcore playground (Britney Spears please post a dance video to your favorite song off HELL CAN’T SAVE YOU). “I thought it was really fire to see this young black kid expressing himself in such a bold, ambitious way,” Leo says of working with Kia.

While she’s still grappling with anxiety, Monaleo’s various accomplishments have helped to soothe previously “crippling” nerves. “Anxiety is a show-and-prove type of thing for me,” she says. “I’ve done this time and time and time again, and I’ve had a couple bad shows, but even the bad shows were not that bad. So it’s like, “OK, I’m wasting a lot of energy being anxious, and the chances of this going right are really high.’”

In conversation, Monaleo is charismatic and considered, biting her tongue a couple times to make sure she phrases her point precisely. “I kept having to remind myself there’s really no wrong answer with making music,” she said. “It gave me a bit of wiggle room to try shit and experiment. And if I don’t laugh while I’m recording it, I didn’t put it on the project.”

The FADER: I was looking through a bunch of your freestyles: the Power 106 freestyle you just did, or the Red Bull Spiral freestyle, or even your On The Radar freestyle where you debuted “Ranchero” earlier this year. When you go into these freestyles, are you approaching them differently based on the audience or platform?

Monaleo: That [Power 106] L.A. Leakers freestyle was so difficult for me. I wanted to cancel it because I was so stressed, because I felt like, “This is such a big platform, and if I go on here and I don’t really deliver, I’m gonna do myself a disservice, and I’d rather come back when I feel like I’m ready.” I really, really, really wanted to do it so bad that I didn’t want to do it. I don’t know if that makes sense. I was so excited for it I almost felt like I could not go. I was paralyzed with anxiety. The day before, I didn’t have anything, and I was like, “Man, what am I gonna do?” I’m gonna walk in here and [look bad by comparison] because a lot of people pre-write their verses.

But I’m so glad that I did it, and I did it in one take. That’s just insane, to be that paralyzed with fear and then to go and do it in one take. I really do believe the only person in my way sometimes is me. But when I go to these platforms, I know there’s a certain type of demographic they reach, so I want to make sure to… not pander, but cater to the audience that I’m performing to.

How were things feeling for you before you started recording Throwing Bows?

My life was kind of slowed down […] Music was the last thing I was thinking about, honestly.

You read articles that aren’t favorable, you read comments that aren’t favorable, you read tweets that aren’t favorable. You get in your head like that, and it starts to seep into your fucking bloodstream. Before you know it, you go in the booth to record, [and] you’re discouraged. That’s where I was at, and I wanted to remind myself this shit ain’t even [that serious]…

I think my position is serious, and my impact is serious,and my reach is serious. The interactions that I have with people are serious. Music is definitely very serious, but in terms of a profession, I’m not a doctor. I don’t physically save people’s lives. I might emotionally put people in a better state and inadvertently save their lives. But realistically speaking, I’m just rapping funny shit and making people laugh.

One part of the tape that I was really interested to hear about was your beat selection process. You’re covering a lot of different stylistic ground here.

I don’t really trust anybody’s ear like I trust my own ear, so it’s a very tedious process. It’s actually very annoying, if I’m being completely honest. It’s redundant: You sit in the studio and you listen to the same 50 beats in a row and it’s just like, “Oh my fucking God.” We were wasting so much time. spending damn near whole studio sessions going through beats that I hate. So I’m like, “Alright, I wanna be involved in this beat-making process. I want you to take my vision from scratch, and let’s just build it [so] we’re cutting straight to what I like and what I want.

Tell me about some of the songs you worked on from scratch with the producers.

There’s a song on there called “Queen and Slime” by me and Stunna [4 Vegas]. That was born from an idea that I had. I wanted to sample “I’m Broken” by Pantera. I heard it years ago — I think it was Guitar Hero? — and it always stuck out to me. I haven’t played that game in 10-plus years, and to this day, I remember doing a deep dive and looking into their discography because I’m like, “Man, I fuck with this. I don’t know what this is about, but I love it.” It really spoke to me. I’m so glad I thought about it randomly and was like, “Man, I wanna hear this, but in a hip-hop way.” In addition to it being a crazy-ass rock song, I want to bring it into my world.

There was another song on there that we had to take off because we could not get it cleared, but it was called “Chipotle” and it had a Rick and Morty sample. Obviously I love Rick and Morty, and I like the theme song — the instruments really bleed out. I’m so sad we couldn’t make that happen, but it’s alright. Maybe in the future.

One of the samples that really stuck out to me was on “Pimpin’ Ain’t Dead.” How did you link up with TEXAS BOYZ?

I just reached out to my manager, like, “Hey, I want to work with these guys.” I love these cats. I grew up listening to their music. I’m from Mo City, so we played a lot of their music at our parties. That was something for younger me, little Leo. It’s so Texas. It really is just Deep South, fun, party music.

Speaking of regional party music, I was looking back at some of your older features and saw that you did a song with Propain and Beatking. I wanted to ask about Beatking’s recent passing.

It’s super unfortunate. He was a force to be reckoned with in our community. I grew up in Houston, so his music was the soundtrack to my childhood, essentially. I’d be in the car just listening, and it would come on 97.9 The Box.

Certain people you just don’t expect to die. He’s so big — physically, but also just personality-wise. He’s huge. He really takes up space in the room. You feel the loss like you feel a shift in the atmosphere.

Especially between Beatking and Rich Homie Quan dying so recently it’s just felt crazy. I felt like Beatking was going to be posting an Impact font t-shirt every day for the rest of my life until I die.

It reminds you of the mortality of the people around you. I always live in that space because I went to school for mortuary science, so I saw a lot of dead bodies [and] I dealt with death on a consistent basis. That just shifted my mind.

Not to be morbid, but we all will die. And I think if we keep that in mind, the way we treat people will be so much different. If we knew that the person we were talking to could die tomorrow, we might say whatever we want to say and get shit off of our chest. We might really give them their flowers if we kept shit like that in mind.