Lizzo celebrates female friendship on buoyant new single ‘Grrrls’

Lizzo has released a second single from her hotly-anticipated fourth studio album – you can hear it below.

With ‘Special’, the long-awaited follow-up to 2019’s breakthrough LP ‘Cuz I Love You’, already confirmed for a July 15 release, the hip-hop star has now shared ‘Grrrls’, which follows April’s lead single ‘About Damn Time’. The new track, a fierce paean to female friendship, is produced by Max Martin, and features such playfully political lyrics as “We CEOs, and dancing like a C-E-Hoe.”

Full details for ‘Special’ are yet to be announced – no track listing has yet been made public – but Lizzo provided some insight into the wider feel of the record in an interview with Variety back in April. “Broadly, I’ve been working on this album since the summer of 2018,” she said. “It has evolved to a place where I’m proud. It’s one of the most musically badass, daring and sophisticated bodies of work I’ve done to date. I am not done. I’m still pushing out the hits, baby. And I hope that it is some of the most useful pieces of music to ever exist. All I want to do is help people through my music.”

Lizzo has plenty of other irons in the fire; that interview was to promote her body-positive reality TV series, ‘Watch Out for the Big Grrrls’, which saw her audition backing dancers for an upcoming tour. She will hit the road in the US and Canada from September for the first leg of The Special Tour; the dates run through to November, and exclusively take in arenas, including prestigious shows at New York’s Madison Square Garden on October 2 and Los Angeles’ Forum on November 18.

A documentary chronicling the rapper’s rise to prominence is also reportedly in the works at HBO. The as-yet-untitled film will be directed by Doug Pray, who served as an executive producer on the Netflix documentary series ‘The Defiant Ones’, which focused on the working relationship between rap legend Dr. Dre and music mogul Jimmy Iovine. According to a statement, as reported by Rolling Stone, the documentary will tell “the inspirational story behind [Lizzo’s] humble beginnings to her meteoric rise with an intimate look into the moments that shaped her hard-earned rise to fame, success, love, and international stardom.”