This interview was originally slated for publication in the February 2026 issue. The feature below has been updated to reflect the most current developments in Rico Nasty’s career as of February 2026.
By the time Rico Nasty lets out that first bloodcurdling scream in “Smoke Break,” half the kids at Portola Festival look like they have just seen God.
It is late afternoon on San Francisco’s waterfront, fog creeping over the bay like stage smoke. Onstage, Rico is a blur of hair, faux leather, and live guitar, stomping across the risers while a pit of queers, goths, weirdos, and teenage mall rats with fresh septum piercings lose their minds. A girl in fairy wings is crying. A guy in full nu-metal cosplay is screaming every lyric. Two nonbinary kids who look like they grew up on “Smack a Bitch” and Paramore in equal measure are clutching each other like a lifeline.
When Rico hits that high, scraped-raw scream on the hook, a ripple of shock rolls through the back of the crowd. Some people clearly came out of curiosity. By the end of the song, they are believers.
“I love watching people process me in real time,” she tells me a few weeks later, laughing. “Especially new fans. I love when they are like, ‘What the fuck?’ That is my favorite thing to do, even with the fashion. Just that moment where they are like, wait … What is this?”
She is talking to me from tour, on the phone, somewhere between airports and venues on The Lethal Tour, supporting her 2025 rap-rock opus LETHAL for Fueled By Ramen. It is her most cohesive statement yet and also her loosest, a record that sounds like Sugar Trap grew up, lived a little, and crawled back out of the pit with sharper teeth and a softer center. In the months since we first spoke, the era has expanded with the deluxe edition, LETHAL-ER, a sharper, rap-forward extension that doubled down on her technical chops while keeping the distortion cranked.
“It has been very fun and challenging in its own ways,” she says of the tour. “Seeing everybody react to the records is what motivated me to want to drop a deluxe and just keep this good energy going. I had a lot going on business-wise, label stuff that I have talked about before, and my fans stayed. That means the world to me. So I am like, alright, I am going to keep you in tune with some music.”
She is already writing again. What she is hinting at now, as of early 2026, is a new full-length project that feels less like a reaction and more like a decision. “I am building something,” she says carefully. “I am not scrambling.”
Before the Archetype
I first found Rico the way a lot of us did: an algorithmically blessed appearance on a playlist around 2018 or 2019, somewhere between Baby Tate and a J.I.D. deep cut.
At the time, there was a wave of women in rap presenting like cartoon super-heroines of hyper-femininity. Lace fronts, latex, stilettos, bars sharp enough to cut glass. Rico fit the moment and did not fit it at all. Where other rappers leaned polished, she leaned industrial. Where others gave glamazon, she gave DIY goth cyborg, all spikes and platforms and serrated flows.
By then she had already introduced “Sugar Trap” to the world, that glitter-and-razorblade blend of bubblegum hooks and snarling verses that became both her calling card and the name of her label. Songs like “Smack a Bitch” put her in front of a bigger audience and quietly changed the weather. That track in particular helped crack open a new era of “rapper as rockstar,” pulling punk, nu-metal, and SoundCloud chaos into a form that felt like it belonged to young, emo-curious rap kids who were tired of genre borders.
The industry, however, did not always know what to do with her. When she opened Playboi Carti’s King Vamp tour in 2021, some of his fans booed, threw things, tried to bully her off the stage. She later tweeted about crying on the tour bus and feeling pushed to the edge.
It is important to say this plainly: a lot of the rap world did not “get” Rico Nasty, at least not in the moment. She was too loud, too punk, too visually abrasive for some hip-hop purists and not yet visible enough for the rock and alternative spaces that should have claimed her immediately.
So she did what great artists do: She lived, she experimented. She took the long way around.
Reconnecting with Herself
By the time LETHAL dropped in May 2025, the landscape had finally bent closer to Rico’s wavelength. The album arrived through Fueled By Ramen, the same alternative label that helped send Fall Out Boy and Paramore from Warped Tour side stages into the mainstream.
For Rico, a rapper from Prince George’s County, Maryland, who grew up obsessing over rock, rap, and everything in between, it was a full-circle alignment that made a strange kind of perfect sense.
“I made hundreds of songs for this album,” she tells me. “I would think it was done, then scrap the whole thing. I treat music like a diary. Some songs are sad, some are super emotional, some are really rock driven. I would love them, but I had to remember why people come to the shows. They want to feel that energy, that angst.”
So she built LETHAL around records that carried a certain charge. The album runs fifteen songs, from the teeth-gnashing “WHO WANT IT” and lead single “TEETHSUCKER (YEA3X)” to the bruised glow of “SMILE” at the end. The “S” songs, as she calls them, have become unlikely anchors on tour.
“All the S’s go crazy,” she laughs. “Smoke Break, Son of a Gun, Say We Did, Smack a Bitch. They love the S’s. ‘Smoke Break’ is the one where I do that screaming and you can see the crowd like, what is this?”
She pauses, then admits that putting the softer material on the record took more work than the mosh-pit anthems.
“Some of those songs at the end, the slower ones, that was hard for me to put on there,” she says. “Because I had not dropped in so long and I know people know me for the rage. I am used to being the one that breaks the ice. But I was like, no, they need to hear this too. They need to hear where I am at as a person, not only as a performer.”
Critics heard the shift. Some called LETHAL her most wide-ranging project so far, pointing out how it swings from rock abrasion to sugar bright trap and dark, moody rap in ways only Rico can make feel intuitive. Others wrote about the album as a transitional self-reckoning, the sound of a woman stepping out of the cartoonish “character” she built as a teenager and into a fuller, stranger adulthood.
Rico does not exactly disagree.
“I felt like I was living in character for a long time,” she has said elsewhere, and repeats to me in another way. “There was this version of me everyone knew from when I was like 19. At some point you look in the mirror and you are like, alright, when are you going to grow up a little?”
Growing up, for her, looked less like toning anything down and more like naming it. She cleaned out her closet. She took therapy seriously. She deleted apps. She stopped pushing herself into nighttime studio sessions and started showing up at nine in the morning after school drop-off. She let herself be Maria again, not only Rico.
“I record when he is in school,” she says of her son, Cameron. “I drop him off, I go to the studio. I do my calls, my meetings. After three, everybody knows, if you are talking to me it better be an emergency because I am with my kid. That is it.”
She laughs, but there is steel in the boundary.
“I had my baby at 18. I was not out here with it all figured out,” she says. “When people look back in 10 years, I want them to understand that everything I did, I did as a full-time mom. I am always doing mom shit. I hope his happiness when he grows up speaks for itself.”
That sense of control now extends beyond music. Over the past year she has quietly been developing a hair color line inspired by the neon greens, radioactive pinks, and inky blues that have become as synonymous with Rico as the scream. It is less a celebrity side project than an extension of identity, a way of bottling the exact shades fans screenshot and bring to their stylists.
“I have changed my hair so many times,” she says. “It is part of how I express myself. So I was like, why not make the colors myself?”
Tiny Desk, Big Homecoming
If LETHAL is the sound of Rico reintroducing herself, her 2025 Tiny Desk is the visual proof.
The performance, filmed back home in the Washington, D.C. area for NPR’s long-running series, finds her in a room filled with plants, books, and about a hundred people who clearly love her. The crowd looks like a cross section of her life: fans, friends, DMV locals who have been yelling “Sugar Trap” since high school.
“I always wanted to do Tiny Desk,” she tells me. “I did the virtual one first, so being in the actual office was crazy. I did not know there were that many people in there. It feels like this chill poetry night with your friends, not a show.”
At one point she fumbles and has to recover mid-song. It is the kind of moment most artists would beg a producer to cut. Rico loved it.
“When I watched it back I was like, this is so raw and cool,” she says. “I loved how I got right back on my feet. I was having so much fun I literally forgot the cameras were there. That is how you know it was real.”
The set plays like a bridge between eras. You see the screamer, the punk-rap hellraiser who once scared label executives. You also see the grown woman who can step off the mic and grin at a fan who has been with her for eight years, then step right back into the verse without missing a beat.
The Outlier, Not the Archetype
Near the end of our conversation, I ask Rico a question I have been sitting on since I first heard The Rico Story tape nine years earlier. If she thinks about her career now, at 27, does the reality match whatever she imagined for herself when she dropped that first mixtape?
She does not hesitate.
“No. Not at all,” she says. “I would have never known this was possible. Any female rapper I saw back then had to be this certain type of woman. There was no Rico Nasty. So if you had told me I would be touring this much, have fans like this, mean what I mean to people, I probably would have laughed.”
“There is an archetype of a female rapper,” she continues. “I never felt like I fit that. I do not feel like I am really in the conversations. I feel like the weird cousin in the corner. The goth cousin who listens to different shit, who is emo. Which is fine. That is literally who I have been my whole life.”
She says it matter-of-factly, not as a complaint. If anything, there is a hint of defiance.
“I do this for the people who walk in the room and everybody is like, how did they get here, but also they are not going anywhere,” she says. “That is my favorite kind of person.”
I tell her what I have thought privately for a while now: sometimes you do not match the archetype because you are the foundation for something else. In 10 years, when people trace back the lineage of rage-rap girls with chipped black nail polish and arena dreams, they will land on Rico.
She goes quiet for a second.
“Thank you,” she finally says. “I appreciate that.”
Fashion, Film, and Whatever comes Next
Spend five minutes near Rico Nasty in person and it becomes obvious she could have had a whole other career in fashion. When we meet at Portola with my photographer, she shows up performance-ready, tall and statuesque, with the kind of posture and presence you usually only see on runways or perfume billboards. She is one of those rare people who looks famous in street clothes.
“I love modeling,” she tells me. “I would love to be signed to an agency. I am a free agent, so if any agencies have had their eye on me, feel free to reach out.”
Her voice brightens when she talks about Fashion Week, then droops slightly when she explains that touring schedules often swallow those opportunities whole. Still, you get the sense that the right campaign or runway will fold her in at some point.
Acting has already started to claim her. Rico will make her television debut in Margo’s Got Money Troubles, an Apple TV+ series produced with A24 and based on Rufi Thorpe’s 2024 novel premiering April 15, 2026. The show stars Elle Fanning and Nicole Kidman, with Rico in a recurring role as KC, part of an ensemble that also includes Michelle Pfeiffer, Nick Offerman, Greg Kinnear, and more.
She lights up telling me about the shoot.
“That was probably the first time in a long time that I felt like a kid,” she says. “You have to get up at the crack of ass. There is no special treatment. You are an actor. Get on set.”
Coming from a world where everyone’s job on set is built around her needs, the shift was clarifying.
“As a rapper, you are at the top of the pyramid,” she says. “In acting, you are like an ant in this whole organism. It is so many people working together on one thing. It is humbling. And you get to learn again.”
She is still auditioning, still in that early, hungry phase of figuring out what this new lane might become. Meanwhile, in the studio, the next album is slowly taking shape, not as a pivot but as a continuation. More control. More intention. Less noise for the sake of noise.
“Music is my passion, and I do not want to be known for anything but my music,” she says firmly. “But acting is fun as hell. You never know.”
Lethal, then Lethal-er
Of course, she is nowhere near done with this chapter of the story. The deluxe edition of LETHAL, titled LETHAL-ER, arrived with new material that leans back into straight-ahead rap. Part of that wave was “PEPPER,” her reunion with Kenneth Blume, formerly Kenny Beats, the producer who helped shape Anger Management and “Smack a Bitch” into generational mosh-pit staples.
She described “PEPPER” as a warm-up that revealed itself to be more than that, a track born out of homesickness for the DMV’s trap roots while living in California. It plays like a victory lap, all bark and bounce and side-eye.
In our call, she keeps returning to the same refrain when she talks about what comes after the tour, after the Tiny Desk glow, after the acting debut, after the deluxe.
“I just want people to keep coming out and having a good time,” she says. “That is really it. Keep showing up to shows. Keep letting me know what you like. I am back in a good headspace, working with people who want to work with me. My team does not take no for an answer, they just pivot. That makes me feel like I can do anything.”
The Long Game
There is a particular sweetness in getting to speak with an artist at the edge of a threshold. When I first favorited Rico Nasty on Spotify, it was purely as a fan. I was not a music editor yet. She lived rent free on my playlists for years before I ever typed a word about her.
Since then I have watched her ride out industry confusion, label drama, misogynistic crowds, and pandemic purgatory. I have watched her step onto a Paramore stage and look like she had finally been dropped into the ecosystem that always should have claimed her. I have seen the girls in the front row who look like the younger version of both of us, eyes wide, thinking, oh. There I am.
When I tell Rico that I think this might be the last time I get to talk to her in a pocket this quiet, she laughs. She does not disagree.
She is 27 with a catalog that already reshaped a corner of rap, an expanded LETHAL era, a new album quietly forming, a beauty line in development, a television series on the way, and a kid at home who still demands mac and cheese at regular intervals. The world is catching up to what she has been for a long time.
Some artists are chasing a trend, but Rico Nasty has built a whole lane that the rest of us are just now figuring out how to merge into.
