Baby Osama’s ‘On Tha Run,’ a seven-track, 12-minute burst of melodic Bronx pop-rap on Tank Girl Records, is her tightest statement yet
Baby Osama makes songs the way other rappers make ad-libs, fast, instinctive, and gone before you can grab them. On Tha Run, the Bronx artist’s new mixtape released October 28 via her own Tank Girl Records, pushes that compression to its logical extreme: seven tracks, barely more than a dozen minutes, each one a sugar rush of melodic trap that ends before it can overstay its welcome. It is less a conventional album than a highlight reel, and in her hands that is a strength rather than a shortcut.
The 23-year-old, born and raised in the South Bronx, has built her style on a single trick that never gets old. She uses AutoTune less as a crutch than as an instrument, bending her croon until it mimics the strings, horns, and synths around it. On Tha Run leans into that gift, stacking drums, jazzy brass, and glossy 2000s pop flourishes under a voice that treats melody as rhythm and rhythm as melody. Opener “6 FIGURE,” produced by hoodrixh, tears out of the gate near 160 BPM, a reminder that for all her sweetness she can still rap with real velocity.
Twelve Minutes, No Filler
What makes the tape work is its refusal to pad. These songs rarely crack two and a half minutes, and Baby Osama uses that brevity as a formal principle, not a limitation. “COUCH SURFER” and “MS.WATUMACALLIT” are the most exposed moments here, trading flex for something closer to confession, while “THE LAST DANCE” filters early-2000s radio pop through her hazy delivery. By the time “PAPARAZZI” arrives, its hi-hats flickering like camera flashes, and closer “ASHTON” blows the speakers out at full volume, the whole thing has come and gone in the time it takes to microwave lunch.
That economy is the point. In an era when rap albums routinely sprawl to 20-plus tracks chasing streaming math, Baby Osama is betting on the opposite instinct, the belief that a perfect 90 seconds beats a bloated four minutes every time. The tape never lingers long enough to sag, and its best songs provoke the exact reaction her early singles did, the urge to immediately hit replay because you were not ready for it to stop.
The New Cool of New York Rap
None of this is new for her so much as newly refined. Pitchfork’s Alphonse Pierre has tracked Baby Osama since 2022, spotlighting early loosies like “RX Baby” and “Free Max B” and placing her among what he called the new cool of New York rap. The FADER profiled her in 2024 as part of a wave of young women reshaping the city’s sound. On Tha Run is the sound of an artist who has absorbed that attention without letting it slow her down.
If anything, she has only sped up. The mixtape lands in the middle of a prolific run that includes 2024’s Sexc Summer and a steady 2025 and 2026 stream of projects like Enjoy the Ride, SKIDMARKS, and GloSama, much of it made, by her account, while touring across the country. That flood-the-zone ethos is core to her appeal. Baby Osama treats releasing music like texting, constant, casual, and intimate, and On Tha Run feels like another quick dispatch from a life in motion.
The obvious knock is that the tape is slight, and in raw minutes it is. But slightness is not the same as emptiness. On Tha Run captures a specific kind of charisma that longer, more labored projects often smother, the feeling of catching a gifted rapper mid-sprint and simply enjoying the view. It will not convert skeptics looking for grand statements. For everyone already tuned to her frequency, it is exactly the hit they came for, over too soon and better for it.
