Atlanta Rapper Behind ‘Bunna Summa’ and More Talks New Music

BunnaB is well on her way to becoming one of hip-hop’s go-to girls for a bit of virality. Take her recent feature on the remix to Charleston, South Carolina, rapper Trim’s “Boat,” a trending song on TikTok since its December releaseWhile the remix marks one of Trim’s first moments in the spotlight, BunnaB had already spent the preceding year as one of the genre’s new darlings. On “Boat,” Bunna is confident and chaotic as all the ways she wants to twerk (and drink and have sex) tumble out of her mouth into the song’s best verse, like Tetris blocks aligning. “Waw bunna really reached a flow state,” wrote a commenter under the official YouTube video. Over on TikTok, a video of Bunna teasing her bars ahead of the remix’s release promptly racked up more than 2 million views. On another recent solo single, “Seeumsayin,” Bunna is barred up over new sounds, too, wrangling Jersey club and blown-out bass.

BunnaB was a big get for Trim. Last summer, she helped catalyze the renewed nostalgia for her hometown of Atlanta’s crunk and futuristic eras. Her songs like “Bunna Summa,” “Innit,” and  “Mad Again” evoke the late 2000s and early 2010s, when the city’s street anthems were slightly silly, fit for a block party on Mars. With Bunna and fellow Atlanta rap girls YK Niece (a good friend of hers), Pluto, and Bankroll Ni leading the charge, megaproducer Metro Boomin capped off the season with the definitive mixtape A Futuristic Summa. Of course, he tapped Bunna for the tracklist, offering her a prominent feature alongside futuristic veterans J Money, Roscoe Dash, Meany and DJ Spinz on “My Lil Shit.” But for Bunna, this dip into the past wasn’t calculated. “I feel like everything just happened,” she tells Rolling Stone. “When I’m in the studio, I don’t try to intentionally do things.” When she first heard the beat for her breakout single, last January’s “No Drought,” she didn’t even recognize the prominent sample of Crime Mob’s 2006 smash “Rock Yo Hips” in it. 

Bunna has decided not to share her age herself, but her manager, Terrence “Snake” Hawkins, (known for his work alongside stars like Young Thug, Gucci Mane, T.I, and Young Dro) freely mentions it to me. Let’s just say she would have been quite young when futuristic icons like Travis Porter, Rich Kidz, J Money, Gucci, and Dro reigned over the scene. Still, J Money has given Bunna her flowers for the resurgence, she says. They shot a video for their Jermaine Dupri-helmed single “Magic City Money” together, alongside Bankroll Ni. “He be like, ‘Thank you. You really bought it back,’” Bunna tells me.

Like the burgeoning rapper predicted last April, it was a “Bunna Summa” indeed. By June, Lizzo name-dropped Bunna as one of a handful of Atlanta rap girls she was listening to nonstop. Houston rap darling Monaleo has also become a fan of Bunna’s, and a source of friendly advice. “She always gives me encouraging words every time I talk to her,” Bunna says. GloRilla has shown love, too. The real measure of Bunna’s reach, though, is the ordinary people who love her, like the women at my Atlanta spin studio who go crazy for her trendy songs. 

While social media popularity can be fleeting, BunnaB and her team are working on building something sustainable. Snake has helped her set up her own companies to house her work. He breaks down her budgets with her and encourages her to prioritize ticket sales. “I feel like he teaching me the right ways to go,” Bunna says. “What not to do, how to be a businesswoman, and build myself as an artist.” Snake says Bunna will release her debut album this year and hopes it’ll reflect the magnitude of her new experiences. “We just keep encouraging her to have fun with the music, encouraging her to make healthy relationships with other artists, other writers, producers,” he says. “If she stays focused and continues to evolve, the music will continue to evolve.”

For a brief moment last October, though, it looked like Bunna’s time could have been up. A video made the rounds of some students booing when she was declared a performer for Atlanta colleges Spelman and Morehouse’s storied homecoming. Later, some clips of Bunna looking unenthused at her set spread as well, with Bunna later telling TikTok she decided to return the energy with an unmotivated performance. That all turned out to be more fluke than prophecy though, as Bunna hit around 18 more college concerts last fall and had a blast — especially at Winston-Salem State University in North Carolina, where she got to crowd surf. “When I got onstage, it was just all energy,” she says. “That was my favorite school that I’ve been to so far.”

Bunna takes my call from a car in November, riding across the D.C. area in the middle of her college run, dubbed the Ice Cream Girl Road Trip: Homecoming Edition. She decided not to call this — nor the eight-city original Road Trip before it — a tour. “You’re going to know when it’s a tour,” she says. She’s armed with the bright smile and giggly demeanor she’s come to be embraced for, despite having lost her dad a few years ago. He encouraged her to rap since she was a little kid. Bunna says she hasn’t really had time to wrap her head around the grief. “Everything been happening so fast for me,” she says, “But I know it’s going to come soon.” Still, she says the unfettered happiness she’s known for is real: “It’s natural. For other people, I don’t know why they be so mad. I feel like mad shouldn’t be natural. Everybody go through stuff, but I feel like you don’t have to show it on your face what you go through.” 

Her bubbly persona often comes packaged in pink clothes, pigtails, and bows — she’s leaned hard into the sugary aesthetic of her “Ice Cream Girl” alias. This look, her playfulness, and spate of shows at colleges and high schools makes it seem like her base is mostly youthful, but she insists it spans all ages. “Old people can wear bows too,” she says. Influential Atlanta producer Jermaine Dupri, for one, says he was surprised to find her rapping about very adult themes. “I got a 14-year-old daughter that’s really, really into all of that,” Dupri says of Bunna and her contemporaries. “It’s crazy because the stuff that BunnaB is talking about is the same stuff that Cardi B is talking about.” Bunna says she doesn’t do everything she raps about; for example, she doesn’t drink or smoke weed. “I make music for the people,” she says. “It’s just not based on my feelings. If I rap about me all my life, who going to relate to it?”

Bunna is the mom to a three-year-old daughter, and believes kids, like her own, should be free to listen to what they like. “I’m not going to control what you can look at and listen to,” she says. “My momma didn’t control what I did. Well, certain stuff — as long as you ain’t looking at no crazy shit. I don’t be having no explicit-ass videos. Music is music. I feel like kids don’t be knowing the meaning anyways.” 

Snake thinks Bunna’s natural radiance and how she channels it on TikTok are what set her apart. “Her biggest thing is ‘I want people to be happy,’” he says. He mentions a TikTok she filmed recently with another manager of hers, Sarahn: “She was dragging her around the little chair that spins around in the hotel room, just having fun. I’m learning from her, organic content works best versus content that you always have to produce. She’s at her best when she’s at that mode.” Snake sees the same passion for her fanbase he saw in T.I., Thug, and Gucci. “She goes to her P.O. box. The things that her fans send, she gets on Instagram and she shows the world,” Snake says. “They send her wigs, she’ll wash those wigs and she’ll wear them. That’s attention to detail in regards to the fan base that the greats got to have.” 

Bunna is strikingly comfortable interacting with the masses online, in spite of the sometimes harsh criticism she and people like her friend YK Niece have received. She recorded the 2025 track “Just a Girl” about the bullying about their bodies they faced after their first major performance at Atlanta’s State Farm Arena. “I like the internet,” she says. “I like entertaining the internet. I like having conversations with them. They talk shit, but I ain’t the type to take the talk seriously.” Sometimes she laughs at it. Other times: “I reply like, ‘Shut your bitch ass up.’” Either way, with a new project in the works, she seems ready for more. “Boy, the internet can do something to some people,” she says. “But I won’t let it get to me.”