Rico Nasty is watching Upgrade when Revolver calls, and the irony isn’t lost on us. The 2018 sci-fi film follows a protagonist who reboots themselves into a killing machine after suffering trauma, which is essentially Rico’s origin story for her latest era. In 2023, the Maryland rapper knew she had to start over, so she fired her entire management team after they consistently tried to box her into music that she had no interest in making.
“I literally crawled from under rocks,” she says. “Y’all don’t understand. It was really dark.”
Since her 2018 mixtape, Nasty, Rico has pushed the envelope on how aggressive hip-hop can get — cuts like “Rage” incorporated metal guitar samples to back up vicious verses. From there, she expanded into myriad genres, some a result of her natural inclination to explore new sounds, others a result of her team at the time pushing her into playlist-friendly tracks.
Her latest album, 2025’s aptly titled LETHAL, is 100 percent a reflection of Rico’s vision — and it has teeth, mixing edgy rap with raw rock complete with live instrumentation. “SMOKE BREAK” is straight-ahead punk that’s chased by heartbroken indie-emo on “CRASH.” Deftones’ Chino Moreno praises her as a “hybrid sort of artist” who offers “something for everybody.”
Rico says of LETHAL, “I wanted to flow through so many emotions that no one would get bored. You know, they’re getting all these different vibes at all these different BPMs… You can vibe to it, you can bounce to it, and you can get to know me through it.”
Her Dia De Los Deftones inclusion feels like a validation of her recent moves. “My reaction was, ‘Why are you lying to me?’” she laughs about getting the offer. Deftones have soundtracked her creative process for years, and she’s blasted their songs while getting in the headspace for video shoots, chasing a perfect balance of “hard but sexy and serious.”
Now, embodying all those adjectives and more, Rico is boldly stepping into a wide-open future of her own making. “I’m just excited for life right now,” she says. “It feels so good to just be able to even say that out loud and be like, ‘Damn, I actually did all that to get here.’”