Kaash Paige Reignites Her Fire With New EP KAASHMYCHECKS

Kaash Paige is turning heads again with her latest EP KAASHMYCHECKS, a six-track ride that feels like stepping into the wildest party you never made it to. The Dallas-born singer and rapper, once signed to Def Jam, fully taps into her alter ego on this project, embracing reckless freedom and hedonistic highs.

On opener “GIRLSGONEWILD,” Paige sets the tone with concert-fueled energy and flirtatious encounters, before slipping further into a self-indulgent haze across the record. It is a raw reflection of excess, one that the 24-year-old admits nearly consumed her.

“When your mind’s so altered all the time, you don’t really know what you want,” Paige tells AFROPUNK. “You don’t really know how to trust people. At least for me; my mind was constantly altered with smoking and drinking. I was a party animal.”

The chaos of the West Coast lifestyle eventually became too much. After moving back home to Dallas, Paige recognized that what once felt like luxury was really a cycle of distrust and overindulgence. “A lot of the stuff from the KAASHMYCHECKS era for me, personally, I don’t do anymore,” she explains. “I don’t drink or smoke anymore. I was overindulging and I’m the type like, ‘We’ve got to finish the bottle.’”

“I feel like it made me very vulnerable,” she continues. “I had to just cut that out of my life and I felt like since I came back to Dallas, I’ve been very in tune with who I am and what I want for myself.”

Still, the music on KAASHMYCHECKS does not shy away from Paige’s past. From the strip-club-ready “2 Bad Bitches” to the Juicy J-assisted “Pimp Daddy,” she embraces the same unapologetic bravado often reserved for her male counterparts. “I was bringing the strip club to me,” Paige recalls. “At the time I had a penthouse in downtown LA, so it was like flexing the crib, flexing my Benz, just having a whole bunch of people around me, not making the best decisions and turning up with a lot of girls. [I was living] a very lustful life.”

The project closes with “Whole Lotta Swag,” a song that almost never made it into her catalog. Originally crafted as a demo idea for 21 Savage, Paige decided to keep it. “At first, it was just kind of like a loop ‘cause I was initially recording hook and melody ideas for 21 Savage,” she shares. “And then we came across one and I was like, Damn, I don’t know if I can give it to 21. I feel like I want this for myself.”

That moment of self-trust mirrors the independence she gained after leaving Def Jam. Paige signed at just 18, but soon realized the label’s shifting infrastructure no longer served her. “I just wanted change, I wanted to see what else was out there. I can’t stay in the same environment for a long time, hence why I move around so much,” she says. “I just texted [Def Jam CEO] Tunji [Balogun] and I was just like, ‘Hey, I really appreciate being a part of this legacy, but it’s something in me that just wants more and I want to experience another side of what the industry could be.’”

Her exit allowed for reflection on both her rushed deal and her viral success. “I used to tell everybody that in high school, ‘I’ll be famous one day. I’ll be signed to a record label,’” she remembers. “Everybody would be like, ‘Girl, all right, whatever.’ And when the contract came, I think I was just so quick to sign it because I was just like, ‘I don’t know if I’ll ever get this chance again.’”

“But I know if I didn’t sign it, I would be a multi-millionaire right now because ‘Love Songs’ is obviously one of my biggest records,” she admits. “That song has two or three billion streams globally, if not more. Obviously, I’d be a multi-millionaire, but God was very intentional and I needed that.”

With KAASHMYCHECKS now released, Paige is already looking ahead to an R&B album she plans to drop before year’s end, which fans will hear alongside her tour stops this fall. She promises an elevated sound that mirrors her personal growth, especially when it comes to love. “I’m realizing I need to grow up if I want to experience real love. It’s easy to get any girl. It’s easy to turn up. All these girls want, especially the ones that I met in LA, they all want the same thing. They just want to be tricked on and as my mom likes to say, ‘Them hoes just want a free meal.’”

Heartbreak pushed her toward this realization, and her next project will pull from that experience. “I realized I really do like being in love. But that KAASHMYCHECKS version was still a part of me, so it was very hard for me to be fully committed. I feel like I was just hurting her in the process and we were just really damaging one another.”

Paige, never one to be boxed in, is also eager to weave EDM into her R&B and hip-hop palette, expanding her sound for festival crowds. “Throughout my whole career, making R&B has been amazing. I’m always going to make R&B. But I think I realized at the festivals that shit gets really boring. Like, nobody wants to sit around and hear that. And so, sometimes it makes me laugh when I hear, ‘We missed the old Kaash. Why are you not putting out R&B?’ I’m going to put out R&B, but I’m an artist, I’m a chameleon.”

Kaash Paige is in motion, no longer just chasing the high of the party, but finding clarity in her evolution as an artist.