Princess Nokia Drops New Emo Mixtape and Video for “Your Eyes Are Bleeding”

Puerto Rican rapper Destiny Nicole Frasqueri — better known to the world as Princess Nokia — has just released a new mixtape and it’s getting so much incredible buzz. Today she dropped the mixtape A Girl Cried Red and a new single and video for “Your Eyes Are Bleeding.”

Her latest release is a shift from her earlier music and has more of an alternative edge to it. She explains: “Yes, it’s not just a little touch of [emo] or it blended into hip hop,” Princess Nokia said to Fader. “It’s real alternative music.”

Here’s the video for “Your Eyes Are Bleeding.”

In an interview with Dazed, Princess Nokia talked about the inspiration for this emo mixtape including the title.

“Blood, like a girl cried blood,”Princess Nokia told Dazed. “It’s taken from my favorite song, ‘The Robot with Human Hair.’ I have a lot of references from this Dance Gavin Dance album, and the first line in the song is ‘Your eyes are bleeding.’ I always loved that image, and it’s a big motif in my work. The mixtape name is supposed to mean a girl cried blood, or a girl cried fury. There’s so many interpretations of what red is.”

While Princess Nokia has been releasing music since 2010 under various monikers, her real music break came in 2016 with the release of her mixtape titled 1992.

The 25-year-old rapper says that emo is having a big resurgence especially in hip-hop mainly within the minority community.

“There’s a vulnerability in associating with pain and sadness that has always lived in that narration,” Princess Nokia told Dazed. “For example, the blues. Black people have always loved the blues — they basically created the blues. Black people created rock music, it’s a fact. Black people created bluegrass and rock and roll way before Elvis Presley and The Beatles. Black people created punk — the band Death was way before The Ramones. Same with Bad Brains. If you think about it, the wool has been pulled over our eyes. This is our shit. Very naturally, that’s why we return to it. It’s ours, it will always be ours.”