Megan Thee Stallion is shedding her old skin in vulnerable new track Cobra

Megan Thee Stallion has been through a hell of a lot this past year. In August, rapper Tory Lanez was sentenced to 10 years in prison for shooting Megan in both feet after a highly publicized and contentious trial, which she called “a victory for every woman who has ever been shamed, dismissed, and blamed for a violent crime committed against them.” While that experience would be enough to send anyone into a pretty dark place, it wasn’t even Megan’s only time in the courtroom over the past twelve months. The “Bongos” rapper has also been locked in a three-year legal dispute with now-former label 1501 Certified Entertainment, which she just settled earlier this month.

It’s hard to be a hottie under those conditions; or as Megan puts it in her new single “Cobra,” “this pussy depressed.”

The track—the first “funded straight out of Megan Thee Stallion’s pockets,” as she shared in an Instagram live earlier this month—sees the rapper open up about all the hardship she’s had to undergo throughout over the past year, while also emerging more powerful than ever.

“Just as a snake sheds its skin, we must shed our past over and over again,” the rapper intones, before crawling out of a cobra’s mouth in the first shot of the Douglas Bernardt-directed video. In her typical cool and confident tone, Megan goes on to illustrate her experience with depression (“Damn, I got problems / Never thought a bitch like me would ever hit rock bottom”), feeling abandoned at her lowest (“Breaking down and I had the whole world watching... Every night I cried, I almost died / And nobody close tried to stop me”), and even contemplating suicide (“How can somebody so blessed wanna slit they wrist”).

In the end, though, this is a tale of an already very open and vulnerable artist reclaiming her story once and for all. “He keep callin’, hmm, I ignore it / He say I’m crazy, hmm, don’t I know it,” she raps in the song’s conclusion, at once marrying both her trauma and triumph. If this is indeed Megan’s new skin, it sure looks good on her.