When Megan Thee Stallion moults in a glass box while a gaggle of suits looks on with flashlights in the music video for “Cobra,” she’s shedding more than just a special FX skin. Done with the witness stand, settled with her former label, and fresh from a goofy she-EO role in Dicks: The Musical, Meg’s finally in a position to slough off a painful era. The transformation commences with “Cobra,” on which she methodically lays out life at rock bottom: missing her parents, wanting to die, and drinking to survive with some guy who thinks he’s just ripping celebration shots with the Hot Girl. It’s her most withering review of the world around her since “Thot Shit.”

Meg strikes at several targets on “Cobra,” set to the churning electric guitar of a pressure-cooker Bankroll Got It beat: the cheating lover and fake friends, shameless profiteers turning a blind eye to her burdens. “Long as everybody gettin’ paid, right?” she spits coolly, a barbed-tongue primary source: You think you know better? I was there. Meg has lived to tell the tale, and by the time she’s through, all there’s left to do is bask in the impact of her words to an epic guitar solo, her horrors immobilized in one last puddle of venom.