Rapper and Singer Belis Returns Home and Rediscovers Her Voice

Bryce Gotta opens the video for her latest single “Gucci” in an abandoned industrial park at night. Illuminated by a pulsing searchlight, Gotta, who raps, sings and crafts sensual, relatable and mysterious songs as Belis, glances over her shoulder. Her expression is inscrutable, like Mona Lisa without the smile. Is she giving the viewer a come-hither look, a wordless challenge or something else?

As an artist, Belis is similarly complex. The progeny of a musical family — her grandmother performed in a French Cajun band — she learned to play piano and guitar, sang in church choir and began recording and posting her original music online at age 16. Then, at age 17, she was struck down with a debilitating disease.

While most of her peers were socializing and going to high school, Belis was relearning how to speak and sing.

The “Gucci” song and video seem to reflect a pensive ambiguity informed by Belis’ health crisis, a sense that safety and risk are never far apart. As slightly eerie, Farfisa organ-style keyboards wobble and waver, skittering trap beats stutter and Belis strides through the abandoned complex.

Facing the camera, she conjures with rippling hand gestures that both beckon and hold the viewer at bay. Belis’ signature high-pitched, slightly slurred vocals are an instrument in the mix, with slippery syllables threatening to dissolve into harmonics. Her sweet melodic voice belies the bold self assurance and sense of adventure in her lyrics.

“I love it when they’re cheerin’/ Scream it louder and louder and louder/ Are you down?/ I’m gonna make some noise…”

Like much of Belis’s recent work, “Gucci” is fluid, assured and personal. It merges the processed production and high energy of 2010-era hyper pop with the melodicism and deft lyricism of early 2000’s indie pop and the rhythms, rhymes and poetic impact of hip-hop and trap music.

When warranted, as in “Gucci,” Belis is not above a bit of shit-talking.

“Aye I heard it through the wire/ That she broke your trust prior/ Her whole life sound like satire…”

While the production on the song is layered and polished, the accompanying video boasts a rude, run-and-gun vitality. Shot in NoDa by her friend Deven Knight, Belis knocked out the edits on the visuals herself and threw it online.

“‘Gucci’ was a zero-dollar budget thing,” Belis says. “I [was] getting bored in the house. I really want[ed] to go outside and give something to YouTube.”

On July 18, nearly three months after the “Gucci” video dropped, Belis premiered her new video for “Pretty Without the R,” a song she originally recorded in 2023 in collaboration with Estonian indie-pop composer and performer Destroy Boring.

The tune recently hit over 1 million streams. A day later, on July 19, Belis returned to Los Angeles, a city she called home for four years, and played a gig as part of her summer 2025 Third Times the Charm tour. The tour will take her to Snug Harbor on July 26.

The tour will lead into the release of her debut full-length album, East Coast Baby.

Belis regains her voice and creates her sound

Belis’ current flurry of artistry and activity is all the more impressive because of the health obstacles she’s had to overcome in recent years. It started eight years ago when one side of her face went numb.

“In 2017, I had my first neurological issue,” Belis remembers. “The left side of my face was paralyzed. I couldn’t feel anything.” 

At 17 years old, Belis was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis (MS), a chronic, often unpredictable autoimmune disease that affects the central nervous system and can cause muscle weakness, fatigue, coordination difficulties and cognitive changes.

She didn’t know anyone who was going through similar hardships.

“Your friends are like, ‘Your face looks fucked up. What happened? Did you do drugs?’” Belis says. “I didn’t look like myself or feel like myself.”

Distraught and feeling isolated, Belis stopped going to classes at Hough High School in Cornelius. She continued her studies online, eventually graduating via remote classwork, a process that only added to the isolation.

The experience did have one silver lining: It gave Belis plenty of time to work on her music. MS had no effect on Belis’ pitch or range, but diction was a different matter.

“When your cheek goes paralyzed, you have to move your [facial] muscles differently to talk,” she notes. One result is Belis’ signature vocal slur, giving new meaning to the term “mumble rap.”

“My words [can be] unintelligible,” she says. “You can’t make them out sometimes.”

By 2019, Belis had gained a social media following, which helped her find and connect with others who were either living with MS or knew someone who was.

“Relating to people online was useful because I didn’t know anyone in real life that was also going through what I was dealing with at the time,” she said.

Belis says her MS has been under control since 2019. While she was recovering she had devised her sound, which she describes as influenced by early 2000s pop and indie pop as well as by rap and trap music from 2010-20.

“Charlotte has a diverse community,” Belis maintains. “I got into a bunch of different styles of music and I wanted to make my own [style] that was a mixture of all of it.”

In the process, Belis realized that her music could be more than a passion project.

“I wanted to do more [with music] than what I’ve seen my family do, like take it to another level,” she notes.

Having built a committed online following, Belis saw some of her songs go viral on Twitter. She started getting offers for record deals and made trips to New York and L.A. to meet with record company representatives. 

In Los Angeles, the independent West Hollywood-based label Amigo Records (Kim Petras, Joy Oladokun) brought Belis and some producers she had worked with previously into a studio to create the song and video “Intel.”

Blonde in the video, bedecked in bejeweled eyeshadow, and moving across glistening backgrounds, the usually dark-haired Belis may look different to fans in the “Intel” visuals. The song, however, is definitely hers, with a straight-forward yet ethereal rap flow, ticking slippery beats and wobbly interstellar electronics. 

“I made that song just thinking about what my future could be like, and what I would be leaving behind in Charlotte if I moved,” Belis says. “I was questioning if I actually wanted to [move], and just how that made me feel.”

In 2019, Belis signed with Amigo and has remained with them ever since. Soon after the  signing, she moved to L.A., as it made more sense to be in the same city as her label, availing herself to its resources.

“I didn’t have a team in Charlotte at the time, “ Belis remembers. “I was young and wanted some direction. I was trying to find it out there.”

Her Hollywood experiment lasted four years. 

“It taught me a lot about what I want out of my life and my music, and what is fulfilling to me,” Belis says. “And it’s not Hollywood. I don’t like the parties and the social ladder climbing.”

With the L.A. scene proving not as wholesome as she hoped, Belis started building a team back in Charlotte, with an eye toward moving back to her hometown.

Collaborations, returning home and hitting the road

While in L.A., Belis discovered that she enjoyed doing features, or guest spots, with other artists. The collaboration with Destroy Boring, “Pretty Without the R,” is just one tune off place4us, a full album Belis recorded with the Estonian composer in 2023.

Belis also guested on “Clear Conscience,” a tune by dream-pop/noise artist BOMBEI.exe., Seoul-based electronic artist 404’s single “NUMB U” and more. 

Belis says most of her features are paid commissions, a side hustle to help pay for her own tours, which she plans, books and puts together with no input or financial support from her label.

“[Features] give me the money to go out and play music for people,” Belis notes. “I also get to meet new people online and collaborate with people [whose music] I might not have known about before.” 

Belis does some features just for fun, like her collaboration with pop artist Mia Gladstone. Belis’ interlude on Gladstone’s witty, wicked parody of internet culture, “Talking Online,” is like an unexpected oasis — the eye in the center of the song’s whirlwind take-down of online stalking, over-sexualization, inappropriate DMs and sham mental health interventions.

Her appearance on the song gave Belis an opportunity to address the sexism she encounters as a woman rapper in the music industry. She recalls going into studios where men would assume — and act — like she was a girlfriend and not an artist.

“Overall the music scene is more inclusive to women now, especially in the rap scene, [but sexism] definitely still happens,” Belis says. 

Nowadays, she avoids such issues by surrounding herself with a team of trustworthy friends and colleagues.

After moving back to Charlotte in January 2024, Belis started recording with her friend and engineer JStacks at his private studio in Mint Hill. All of her merchandise is printed by Gordo Martinez In NoDa and Gabriella Larson does all her photography.

Seven months later, in August, Belis premiered the video for “Normally,” a song that will appear on her forthcoming debut album East Coast Baby. Shot in Dilworth, the pensive, painterly video depicts Belis walking, almost drifting, in a hazy dreamlike reverie through a darkened house. 

Her high vocals suggest an alluring siren’s song, not about a temptress that draws men to their doom but the mutual, often inexplicable attraction that pulls opposites together in a relationship that may be ill-fated from the start.

“It’s my favorite song off this upcoming album,” Belis says. “It’s about having a crush on somebody that’s a little different than you and doesn’t see things in your perspective.”

The “Gucci” video, depicting Belis’ alternating day-and-night explorations of an urban wasteland, dropped in April 2025. She says the propulsive tune reflects her thoughts and feelings about coming home.

“That song is about moving out of L.A. and things I didn’t like [there], like gossip and drugs,” she says. “When I got away from all that, my energy level went up. So, I wanted the song to be high-energy.”

The new video for “Pretty Without the R,” Belis’  2023 collaboration with Destroy Boring, dropped on July 18. The elliptical, celestial-sounding song suggests the music of the spheres, the harmonious sounds that astronomer Ptolemy (100-170 A.D.) said emanated from invisible crystalline spheres that moved all we see in the night skies.

In contrast, the luminous tune’s lyrics suggest a put down of a formerly trusted but now unreliable friend. 

In the video, Belis hangs out with girlfriends as the camera spins and prowls restlessly around the table where they’re seated. Suddenly, she’s riding with a guy in a sports car, then standing in a parking lot at night while the car spins its wheels and burns rubber. The effect is disorienting, dreamy and disquieting.

Meanwhile, Belis has been putting her reclaimed energy to good use. She recently revisited L.A. to play a show on her Third Times the Charm tour. As the name indicates, this is Belis’ third DIY tour.

Her first tour in summer 2023 took nearly half a year to plan.

“I just reached out to everybody that has ever hit me up to book a show and [said], ‘Can I come play at your venue?’” she recalled.

After micromanaging every detail, Belis felt incredibly stressed, but the tour itself, in which Belis billed with local acts from the cities she played in, was a success.

For the second venture in summer 2024, Belis invited Mia Gladstone to hit the road with her. Again, they brought out local acts to fill the bill at each venue. The current tour kicked off in early July with a show at a rooftop bar in Brooklyn and will include Belis’ first stop in Texas. 

After three years of running annual summer tours, Belis says she’s gotten a handle on them, with a better sense of what she’s physically able to do before she gets tapped out and tired. She’s also learned where to play, where she is likely to get the biggest audiences and most receptive crowds. 

On July 26, the tour comes to Snug Harbor, Belis’ favorite Charlotte venue.

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“Their sound people are so helpful and the staff is so kind to artists,” Belis says. “As someone who manages their own events, I really appreciate that.”

Moving forward, Belis says she’d like to do less planning and managing of her own DIY tours and transition into playing larger festival gigs.

“I don’t have to manage [a festival],” she notes. “I just have to show up and it’s a platform to get new listeners.”

Once the current tour ends, Belis plans to drop three more singles from her upcoming album before releasing it in full. She doesn’t have a release date for the album yet.

Like “Gucci,” East Coast Baby is about coming home, after spending so much time away, Belis says.

“It’s about things I miss, things I don’t like and things I love,” she adds. “It’s things I learned that inspire me to try something new.”

For Belis, change and growth seem the only constants in a career defined by contrasts — ethereal sounds vs down-to-earth concerns, and tangible emotions compared to mysterious, if sometimes hard-to-decipher words.

Like the best and most inquisitive artists, Belis may just be touching the infinite from time to time, delivering songs and sounds that can inspire listeners to do anything they can dream.