BunnaB on “Bunna Summa,” Ice Cream Girls, and Atlanta swag

A summer smash and her big personality has made the east Atlantan her city’s next all-star. Photographer Gustavo Marinho

The FADER’s longstanding GEN F series profiles the emerging artists you need to know right now.

“I started hating the studio,” BunnaB admits. “So I just stopped going.”

Most artists dream of signing to major labels, but BunnaB didn’t care when she got dropped from her last deal. Her 2023 single “My Man” had sent A&Rs calling, but personnel changes ground the Atlanta rapper’s momentum to a halt. Bunna tried to work around the hurdles, investing her label advance into starting a daycare business and putting up her own money for video shoots, but eventually creative differences became too much to bear.

“I made this art that I like and somebody coming and editing my art,” she explains. “Once they seen me stop going to the studio, they hit me up like, ‘yeah, sorry Bunna you’ve been dropped from the label.’”

“Usually people [would] probably be mad, but I ain’t have no feeling towards that. I was like, ‘Okay.’”

That was January. Eight short months later, BunnaB is calling me from Los Angeles, hard at work on the follow-up to her promising April debut, Ice Cream Summer, and its June deluxe. Blending Atlanta trap with just a dash of futuristic swag, her sound is well-suited for the moment, but the biggest draw is her outsized personality: a little bratty, a little bossy, all star power. Just listen to her troll haters on “Bunna Scoop” or “Last Laugh,” smirking around every syllable whether her flow is laid-back or hyperactive.

Millions of streams, sold out shows, the multiracial coalition of women lipsyncing to her songs on socials — however you define success in 2025, BunnaB obviously clears the bar. January single “No Drought” built up serious buzz for the newly independent artist’s hopscotch flows and infectious charisma; the song’s success was particularly validating because her old label had refused to drop it. A few months later came “Bunna Summa,” an ode to waterfalling Reposado out the bottle with a chorus labgrown to soundtrack photodumps and vertical videos alike: Yeah we bout to have funnnn / you know summer’s just begun… Naturally, it was an early song of the summer contender, and Bunna’s biggest song to date.

Around the same time, she inked a new deal with APG and brought on a manager, Terrence “Snake” Hawkins, who’s worked with Gucci Mane, Young Dro, Coi Leray and Veeze.

“This time around, they let me do what I do,” Bunna says of the new partnership. “And on the business side, I’ve been growing up and learning how to deal with people — now every time they’re doing some stuff, I’m always involved.”

Born Ereunna McCoy, BunnaB grew up on the east side of Atlanta in Edgewood in a Section 8 apartment that has since been torn down. Growing up the second oldest of 10 kids, Bunna remembers babysitting her younger siblings, watching Disney Channel, and cleaning the house (“My mom ain’t really let us go places”). She loved the music of her city, artists like Rich Kidz, Future, Young Thug and YFN Lucci; in high school, her older sister booked her a studio session for her birthday.

“The day before, I was at home with my cousin on the couch and we was just writing down, freestyling little songs,” Bunna recalls. “The next day when we got into the studio, it was probably 30 more minutes left in the session. My other cousin was like, ‘Let’s go ahead and do what we wrote yesterday,’ I’m like, ‘you really wanna do that lil shit?’”

That “lil shit” became “My Man,” a sugary, Rich Kidz-indebted take on falling in love with a neck-tatted dealer on a two-man. BunnaB’s warbled Auto-Tune hook is honestly ridiculous, but her lovestruck performance pumps genuine affection into lines like, “He always tote that Glock when he selling weed.”

The song’s snippet blew up on TikTok and Bunna hurried to the studio to re-record it. “I had a man, but I was talking about a different man on that song,” Bunna giggles. “So I booked another studio session to redo it so my man couldn’t be mad at me.”

Bunna only dropped a handful of singles under her last deal, though it’s hard to say she’s particularly fond of any of them. “Them songs, they never did nothing. And the songs after that, if you listened to what I dropped on that label, you can hear like, that’s not her sound.”

Despite the dour assessment, BunnaB spent 2024 sowing the seeds for future wins. Key components of her musical style were coming into focus, from her take-no-shit persona (“Rider” seems to presage this year’s “Bold”) to her signature adlibs (“Ice creeeam girl;” “Ah dadadahhh”). Then there’s the aforementioned daycare business. “My family, they’ll tell you, ‘you need a second option,’” Bunna says. But music always came back — I think it’s in my genes.”

In September, she met her boyfriend Baby Kia after he performed at Druski’s Coulda Fest. The pair had seen each other around, at local high school pep rallies and on the gram, but after the show Kia invited Bunna to the studio.

“He told me to pull up and let’s make a song — but he was already doing a song with somebody else. So I’m like, how the hell we gonna make a song? He just wanted me to be there,” she laughs. “After that, we never stopped talking to each other.” Kia recently starred in the video for “Fine Shyt,” subbing in at the last minute when Bunna was “too shy” to work with a hired hand.

But shy is the last word you’d use to describe BunnaB on record, where breezy melodies and nursery rhyme hooks (“Luv My Man”) butt up against nimbler verses and viciously sharpened barbs (“Bunna Scoop”). Percocet has drastically improved the sex lives of Bunna and her homegirls (“Awf Da Perky”); the jingle of a Mister Softee truck spurs meticulous interrogation of other women’s swag (“Ice Cream Girl”). And the best song on the expanded edition of Ice Cream Summer isn’t its biggest hit “Bunna Summa” but “Innit” with YK Niece, the pair’s intensity ratcheting up every time they trade lines. “He eat this shit I’m talmbout sloppy!” YK sneers early on. “You better throw it in a circleeee / nut in it, boy you know this pussy fertileee,” Bunna grins.

Bunna and YK weren’t close when they both attended Maynard Jackson High School, but the pair reconnected when a mutual friend passed away in April 2023. And earlier this year, when PLUTO and YK Niece recorded “WHIM WHAMMIE,” they hopped on BunnaB’s IG Live to try and get her on the song. That didn’t quite pan out, and YK and PLUTO fell out shortly afterward.

“After that happened with them, she ended up texting me like, ‘Bunna let’s do a song together.’ I was in the studio, so I told her pull up,” Bunna recalls. “We had like an hour left in the studio, both up in the booth just talking back and forth to each other, and it worked out.”

Since then, Bunna’s been splitting her time between Atlanta and Los Angeles, working on a mixtape set to drop in October. She’s tight-lipped on details, but says she’s been practicing freestyling and punching in, rather than writing her songs, and experimenting with “pop beats” among others, citing Rod Wave and Lizzo as inspirations for their range. But fans of her homegrown sound have little to fear: she shows me a couple songs produced by Zaytoven that seem sure to please.

There’s the requisite lover girl anthem “I LIKE EM,” which closely follows the footsteps of “My Man” and “Luv My Man.” “That boy my dog, you know I’m his meow / get his money, yes I milk him like a cow / I love everything about him, that’s not usually me and I just be like ‘How?’” unfurls one run-on bar. And on “Hesitation,” BunnaB picks apart an ain’t shit dude over a booming 808, going through his phone before taking bleach and a baseball bat to his car. “Why you do the shit you do? You know your bitch crazy / when I see you, treat you like an opp, bust no hesitation,” she snarls.

While she’s finalizing details on the new mixtape, Bunna’s also gearing up for a handful of concerts across the Southeast U.S., following a sold out hometown show earlier this summer. Even with her proven track record, Bunna still gets butterflies seeing photos of fans lined up outside the venue, but she’s determined to work through the pressure.

“I pray and I get on stage and I see everybody so happy to see me? It’s like all the nervousness goes away — I just got to do it.”

When I ask BunnaB about her longterm career goals near the end of our conversation, she politely demurs, focused on notching consistent wins one at a time. “I’m still trying to learn more about music, but I know I’m working towards doing different things,” she says. “Trying to collab with other artists and make every song that I release bigger than the last.”