Coi Leray spent part of this week on BET talking about her father. On an episode of The Jason Lee Show that aired Wednesday (Sept 16), she said she and Benzino, the rapper and media executive she feuded with in public for years, have reconciled. He has settled into the grandfather role with her one-year-old daughter, Miyoco, who calls him "pop pop." "Me and my dad are really cool now. Like I love him so much," she told Lee, later adding that Benzino "Facetimes me to speak to my daughter if not every other day."

The feud had started on one of her own records. "No More Parties," the January 2021 single that gave Leray her first Billboard Hot 100 entry, included a line about her father letting her down. The two spent the following years calling each other out on social media. The interview aired in the same week that Epic Records released her newest single, "Nothing Into Something."

The song pairs the 29-year-old with Diplo, the producer and DJ whose three Grammy wins include Best Dance Recording for Jack Ü's "Where Are Ü Now." Epic's release materials describe Leray singing instead of rapping over his dance-floor production as she looks back on a lost relationship and on her own rise. The passage the label chose to quote traces a path from the trenches to a multimillion-dollar business, followed by a line marveling that she pulled it off. The video, directed by Zev York, puts her in a studio with a band of lookalikes who help her act out the lyrics.

The single extends a year of genre-hopping releases on Epic and returns Leray to the dance crossover lane that produced one of her two Grammy nominations. It also arrives while Pink Sweatsuits, the project she has been promoting since last September, remains unreleased.

Before the Top 10

Leray, who was born in Boston and raised in Hackensack, N.J., started making music at 14 and left high school at 16 to work in sales. Her first proper single, "G.A.N.," went up on SoundCloud in 2018 as a response to A Boogie wit da Hoodie's "DTB." The mixtape Everythingcoz and the single "Huddy" followed that same year, and a deal with Republic Records led to the mixtape EC2 in 2019 and the EP Now or Never in 2020.

The breakthrough came with public embarrassments attached. In 2021, clips of her performing to a motionless crowd at H-Town Memorial Day Mayhem in Houston and to an unresponsive audience at Rolling Loud Miami circulated widely. Her verse in that summer's XXL Freshman cypher drew mockery across social media, and Montclair High School in New Jersey gave her an honorary diploma the same year. "Players," released in November 2022 over a Grandmaster Flash sample, reached No. 9 on the Hot 100 in 2023. It's still the only top 10 of her career, and it brought a Grammy nomination for Best Rap Performance.

Where the Dance Records Fit

Her work with club producers predates the move to Epic. In 2022 she joined Stefflon Don and Chlöe on Calvin Harris's "Woman of the Year," from Funk Wav Bounces Vol. 2. David Guetta called on her and Anne-Marie the next year for "Baby Don't Hurt Me," a rework of Haddaway's "What Is Love." The song climbed to No. 13 on the UK Singles Chart and earned Leray a Grammy nomination for Best Pop Dance Recording. Guetta also turned up on her second album, Coi, on "Make My Day," which samples Technotronic's "Pump Up the Jam".

"Players" also leaned on club remixes, including a Jersey club version by DJ Smallz 732 whose video, directed by Nimi Hendrix, filled her home state's streets with dancers doing the song's viral challenges. Jersey club originated in Newark, roughly 15 miles south of the Hackensack neighborhoods where Leray was raised.

Diplo's catalog has mixed rap, pop and club music for nearly two decades, going back to his production on M.I.A.'s "Paper Planes" in 2007. He and Leray also worked the same Coachella Sunday this spring. Major Lazer, his long-running project, sat on the festival's main Sunday lineup, while Leray played an evening set on the Heineken House stage on April 12.

A Year of Singles on Epic

Since signing with Epic in February 2025, Leray has released music in short, steady bursts, usually with a different kind of partner each time. Her label debut, the five-song EP What Happened to Forever?, came out Feb. 12, 2025, and dealt with grief, heartbreak and infidelity. By September, three months after her daughter's birth, she had opened the Pink Sweatsuits rollout with "Pink Money," a trap record with G Herbo and Bktherula, its video shot on New York City streets.

After that the collaborators kept changing, as "Act Like You Know" brought in the Los Angeles group Shoreline Mafia and "Lick Back" featured Skrilla. She also appeared on Nali's "Maybe" and DaBaby's "Boomerang." On June 26 she released "Outside" with the Puerto Rican rapper Eladio Carrión, which arrived with an official video through Epic.

The most successful of them is "Better Than Yours," her collaboration with YoungBoy Never Broke Again. Produced by SkipOnDaBeat, it interpolates the hook from Kelis's 2003 hit "Milkshake" and came out March 20. Four months later, during the July 19 to 25 tracking week, it jumped six places to No. 1 on the Mediabase urban radio chart with roughly 5,320 spins. That total was 1,474 more than the week before, the largest gain on the chart, and it pushed Yung Miami's "Spend Dat" down to No. 2.

Epic's copy for "Nothing Into Something" leans on the word versatility, as the label's announcements have all year. Her biggest numbers came from a narrower formula. The Hot 100 top 10, both Grammy nominations and the urban radio No. 1 each came from a record built around a piece of music listeners knew before they pressed play. The records behind them leaned on a Grandmaster Flash break, a Haddaway chorus and a Kelis hook, each moved into a new setting by a producer.

The Album Question

None of this year's singles has landed on an album, not yet at any rate. When "Better Than Yours" arrived in March, promotional copy posted on radio station sites described it as part of the buildup to Pink Sweatsuits, scheduled for release in early 2026. Coverage that month called it her first full-length since Coi in 2023. Six months on, the album is still unreleased, and the press materials for "Nothing Into Something" don't mention it by name.