“It’s time for me to come home and really just turn up,” Coi Leray tells me. The 27-year-old Rap-hit magnet boasts a contagious spring in her conversation when she connects to our transatlantic Zoom call, which might owe itself to the fact that her day, so far, seems to be furnished with a range of endeavours conducive only to the boosting of serotonin. She just ate some chicken tortillas, got her lashes done and is now en route to a fitting for the Off-White show she’ll attend the following week. In a zoomed-out sense, her buoyancy might also be traced to the fact she’s currently bathing in the early days of a revitalising new epoch. Earlier this year, she discarded life in LA, where she’d been resident for five years, in favour of a return to her East Coast roots. Now re-stationed in her childhood state of New Jersey, she’s re-gained proximity to her mum, which, for one, means shedding the burden of finding a dog nanny for her beloved canine. However, cutting on pet daycare costs wasn’t the impetus for upping sticks.

“I honestly was miserable in LA,” she shares. But, leaving the city, at one point, would have been at odds with the uncontainable character of her ambition. “I knew that LA had all my resources there. I’m a businesswoman. I’m a hustler first before anything. I busted my ass every single day. I did what I needed to do, so I could do what I wanted to do and that’s buy my mama a condo and move 15 minutes away from her.” However, Coi’s vacating of the city where dreams materialise reflects the fact that a large portion of hers now irrevocably have. As such, the wellspring of opportunity an LA postcode provides is no longer a prerequisite for her success.

And, to onlookers, that will come as no surprise. Since her 2018 debut mixtape “Everythingcoz”, Coi’s become a central voice in Rap’s intersection between the Underground and the Pop charts. With two studio albums under her belt (2022’s Trendsetterand 2023’s Coi), multiple Grammy and BET award nominations, a roll call of A-list collaborations with RAYE, Fetty Wap and David Guetta (to name but a few), plus a hit of incalculable proportions in pervading 2022 cut “Players” – at the time of writing, there are over 20 million monthly Spotify listeners who call on her to soundtrack their day-to-day.

“It’s the best thing ever to be home,” she continues. And it’s the ideal vantage point for her to reflect on the feats she’s conquered, whilst orientating herself with goals yet to be embarked upon. ”Honestly, where I am right now, I’m in development,” she says. “I felt like this is the year where I really had to sit down for once and process what’s in front of me. And not just with the numbers and the music, but just in life in general. So I figured, I’ll give [the fans] these great songs while I’m in the process of that.” Said great songs come in the form of “Lemon Cars”, a slick six-track EP produced chiefly by production doyen Mike Will Made It (Beyoncé, Rihanna, Kendrick Lamar), released in May.

The title, a nod to the American expression for a malfunctioning automobile, is an ode to giving one’s life an MOT from time to time and nourishing its components. “Even though a car can be so beautiful on the outside, you really have to make sure you know what you’re dealing with, fix and take care of what’s on the inside,” she explains, “because you can’t drive no messed up car.” For Coi, perhaps paradoxically, given today we’re connecting over new music, for her, such maintenance means, primarily, turning her focus away from the industry. “I feel like the music and entertainment business itself is just one world,” she says. “So it feels good to be able to step out and look in the mirror, focus on God’s creation.” In one sense, that means indulging in a girl-scout’s-worthy catalogue of hobbies. “I love getting my hands dirty,” she says. “One day I might want to go do pottery or paint. I might want to wake up and say, ‘Yo, let’s go do an escape room.’ But I also love fishing, camping and eating.”

Personal progression does, inevitably, foster that of the professional kind, however, concurrently, ripples of evolution continue to unfurl in Coi’s artistry. She recently appointed her best friend as her A&R, for example, a reflection of her accumulated understanding that often, there’s nothing like working with a select group of people you can trust unstintingly. “And, I’m the type of artist that’s open to criticism or open to opinion,” she says. “I feed off of that energy in the room. So, I love that my people aren’t yes-men, they’re gonna literally let me know what it is and help me form the best body of work that we can do together.”

Prioritising a tight coterie of collaborators is a far cry from her original approach to recruiting producers – via a Gmail where beatmakers could freely submit their work. Her Coi album marked her first to be co-piloted primarily by one or two key individuals, namely, Pop and Hip-Hop multi-platinum-selling production force, Johnny Goldstein (Madonna, Shakira, John Legend). “That project and that process was so dope to just work one-on-one [with someone]. When you find someone that really believes in you and wants to work with you, it just makes life so much easier.”

To read the full interview, pre-order the Summer 2024 issue here.