Heading into the 2023 Grammys with five nominations, Doja Cat is now talking about different musical directions she’d like to explore on her planned follow-up to 2021’s Planet Her. Speaking to Variety, Doja opened up about wanting “to explore punk.” Though she clarified: “Not pop-punk. I feel like we have enough pop-punk artists right now.”

Here’s Doja’s full rumination on leaning into her punk side:

This is the manic part. I wasn’t gonna tell you. But I’ll just tell you now, because not talking about it is making me annoyed: I want to explore punk. But not pop-punk. I feel like we have enough pop-punk artists right now. And if there needs to be more, then let there be more, but I don’t think I’m the one to do it. I want to explore more of a raw, unfiltered, hardcore punk sort of thing. It’s just something that I’m doing for my own personal fun — getting some drummers and guitarists together. And I don’t even know if that’s gonna make it out there.

She also talked about being a huge Beastie Boys fan, citing their longstanding precedent for mixing rap and punk. “Rap is punk and punk can be rap,” she said. “It’s really a beautiful set of genres that you can twist, and I think people get it.”

Elsewhere, Doja said her next era would see her leaning in a “more masculine direction.” She also chastised fans for comparing her shaved head to Britney Spears: “It’s so incredibly disrespectful for people to be minimizing what Britney went through and make a joke out of something that was very serious and a big deal in her life.”

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