Four tracks into her new mixtape Alligator Bites Never Heal, Doechii is gasping for air. Don’t get it twisted: The 26-year-old rapper isn’t short on lung power. But after five years in the music industry—a period in which she signed to Kendrick Lamar’s former label Top Dawg Entertainment, earned a coveted spot in the 2022 XXL Freshman Class, and charted a platinum single with the R&B-focused “What It Is (Block Boy)”—Doechii yearned for the kind of breather that up-and-comers typically aren’t advised to take. In the final bars of “Denial Is a River,” a candid conversation with a therapist alter ego, Doechii illustrates the consequences of life in the fast lane: Her therapist suggests a breathing exercise, and Doechii hyperventilates rhythmically, flailing in the space between a scribble scratch and a panic attack.

Alligator Bites Never Heal fits Doechii like an oxygen mask. On her most ambitious and musically diverse project to date—19 tracks that feel more sensitive and self-possessed than her recent spate of club-ready singles—she makes room for vulnerability. It’s a formidable full-length debut, fluid yet focused, that reprises her playful and melodic sides without skimping on hard-hitting hip-hop.

Doechii splashed onto the scene with the 2020 EP Oh the Places You’ll Go, a seven-song collection more or less defined by the cutesy viral hit “Yucky Blucky Fruitcake.” she / her / black bitch, her 2022 debut EP for TDE, marked a definitive turn away from the bubbly aesthetic; on subsequent singles, Doechii pushed into harder and faster territory, embracing Rico Nasty’s punk sensibilities on “Pacer” and experimenting with house music on “Alter Ego.” She’s a capable chameleon, but the searching specificity of her early tracks has been MIA. As Doechii put it on recent single “MPH”: “I could give them the conscious shit, but I’m too busy giving them cunt.”

Alligator Bites Never Heal is all about processing not posturing. Doechii raps with sober-minded confidence, acknowledging “lost friends, shed just like loose skin” and the pressures of label expectations and impostor syndrome. On opening track “Stanka Pooh,” she cycles through intrusive thoughts: “What if I choke on this Slurpee? What if I make it big? What if my car exploded while I’m casually pumping the gas and smoking a cig?” Just when it’s getting serious, she tempers the weight with a cutting couplet: “And if those the only fears that I’ll take to my grave/I’m pissing on you hoes living or dead.” That’s Doechii at her nuanced best—anxious, funny, pissing on hoes.

Doechii hails from Tampa, and the mixtape’s swampier sounds drip with humidity, including the thrumming “Bullfrog” and the chopped-and-screwed intro to “Skipp.” Heat takes over on “Nissan Altima,” a standout filled with flavor and filth (if you didn’t know Doechii is bisexual, you’ll find out when she says, “She munchin’ on the box while she watchin’ Hulu”). The raunchy bravado is only temporary, offset by moments of intimacy: On “Bloom,” Doechii’s prayer of self-love resonates through layered harmonies akin to Madison McFerrin. The mellow, sparkling groove of “Beverly Hills” makes an unexpected match for Doechii’s melodic potential. If there’s any real issue with this mixtape, it’s the way several less cerebral tracks cluster together in the final third, creating a dense patch of more lyrically superficial songs.

But Doechii never said she’d put pop to bed. More than once on Alligator Bites, she suggests that TDE is skeptical of her swerve into alternative R&B. “I just can’t sang a little bit? I mean that shit was a hit!” she complains on the cleverly satirical “Boom Bap,” protesting her confinement to rap in a slurry of syllables. Alligator Bites makes Doechii’s stance clear: Nobody puts Doechii in a corner. But if this is the sound of Doechii pushing against constraints, a little friction might not be the worst thing.