Rico Nasty
Hip-Hop/Rap
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. Back then, label executives called her weird for songs like 2018’s paradigm-shifting “Smack A Bit**h,” which kicked open the doors to a dominant new era of “rapper as rockstar.” At a time when female ra**ers dressed like WWE wrestlers, Rico was serving S** Pistols meets Rainbow Brite. Still, for the better part of her decade-plus career, industry bigwigs advised her to try something different while other rappers dabbled in Rico’s style and sound.
Scan your favorite playlist and you’ll hear a generation of up-and-coming rappers inspired by Rico’s balance of high-femme trap-pop and nu-metal rage rap. But for a while, the 29-year-old innovator found herself caught up in other people’s expectations. “I feel like I shot myself in the foot a bit, having all these things that people think that I’m good at,” Rico admits today. “I have all these shoes to fill, and I want to please everybody. I want every fan to feel like, ‘She got one on there for me.’” She felt pigeonholed by the idea, as some A&Rs suggested, that her music transcended rap and that she should lean all the way into her “alternative” identity. “But what makes music fun is bars and metaphors,” she explains. “So at the core of everything that I do is rap music, even if I switch the genre.” Besides, Rico adds—punk fashions aside, she’d been outrapping her peers, both male and female, for quite some time now.
Fans will recognize the title of the resulting 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. While Anger Management had come together in a whirlwind five-day studio session, the process was different this time around—recording in spurts when she wasn’t busy on her 2025 fall tour or filming Margo’s Got Money Troubles, the Apple TV+ series on which Rico made her long-awaited acting debut alongside Elle Fanning, Nicole Kidman, and Michelle Pfeiffer. 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.”)