Rico Nasty

From the moment she arrived, Rico Nasty stood out. Since her breakthrough as a teenager from PG County, Maryland with her own signature blend of aggressive bars and bubbly melodies, the artist born Maria Kelly has been an iconoclastic presence in the rap game. She’s been drawn from the jump to the juxtaposition of hard and soft, countering her sweet-and-sour Sugar Trap sound with the vocal cord shredding mosh-rap that she popularized. Fans will recognize the title of her upcoming album, RX—a project that Rico began teasing back in 2021, then scrapped after it never fully came together. But the original ethos of the project remains the same: “Sonically weird, crazy sounds produced by Kenny and Dylan Brady,” as Rico describes it today. The songs that emerged from their four months of studio sessions channeled the spirit of vintage Rico Nasty: dynamic, funny, and fierce. Most importantly, they did away with the people-pleasing of her past—not to mention with the screaming, though she’s not done with that forever. (As Rico says: “There’s a time and a place.”)