GREO is having a moment, thanks to her latest single "Stormy Weather" going viral on TikTok. The rapper, singer, and musician released the single, along with a gorgeous, cinematic color-coded music video.
GREO saw her chance to prove her multifaceted talent through the release of "Stormy Weather," following a handful of singles she's released since 2019. The track is fueled by the pressure to be or succeed in one thing, and for the coordinating music video, GREO gave her multifaceted artistry color representation, as we glimpse inside her mind to see each talent in red, green, and purple.
Her Twitter handle, @auntiegreo, speaks to the welcoming warmth of her music. It's a wiseness beyond her years, and an ability to call on hip-hop and R&B's past to create a new sound that preaches history and forward progress. On "Stormy Weather," we first encounter her lyricism as a rapper, and as often happens, the eventual layering of her equally talented singing voice is a bright surprise. With her singing and poetic rapping over a carefully sampled backdrop, it's easy to hear notes of Erykah Badu and Lauryn Hill, and even early aughts Jill Scott, Floetry. Listening to her music, it seems GREO is fulfilling that goal set out for her in her artist name.
It's that sweet spot of beautiful flow, artistry and visuals that hit just right on TikTok, where I too found GREO. "TikTok has been really cool! At first I wasn’t really active in terms of posting content, I was just using it to watch videos at 4am," she told us. But two days after posting a video about not blowing up yet, she saw a literal storm of new followers file in—over 15,000 in 48 hours. While that might be a drop in the bucket for some TikTok users, it's an aid to any budding artist trying to get others to hear their music.
Born and raised in Atlanta, and now based in Sacramento, GREO started her career in the setting of the church, singing in Southern Baptist choirs and youth groups. Inspired by the penmanship of hip-hop, she found her own natural ability was in that lyricism, and her artist project displays that wholeheartedly. She has been releasing music under the name GREO—a name stemming from the word "griot," a term for pre-colonial, traveling poets that traveled between villages as the keepers, and orators of tradition—that honors her Liberian and Sierra Leonean roots, a poet of her own, modern kind. The lens through which she creates her music is uniquely her own, one of Black, American, and African artistry.
Stream/download "Stormy Weather" here.
Connect with GREO: Instagram | YouTube | Twitter
