Before she adopted the moniker Rico Nasty, Maria Kelly was a teenager creating off-the-wall sounds, merging genres and spitting peerless rhymes in Washington, D.C. metro area basements.
Long before Nasty released her breakout hit, 2018’s riotous “Smak a Bitch,” or coined the genre “sugar trap,” her family would brag about her bizarre ability to memorize songs and poems after just one listen. “I didn’t need no paper, no nothing,” she recalls. “Growing up, I realized that’s not a normal thing. I’d hear a song and I could remember the melody and the key.”
Though Rico grew up in Palmer Park on the outskirts of Prince George’s County, Maryland, she was sent an hour away to school in Baltimore starting in fifth grade in the hopes she would attain a better education. Instead, she eventually got expelled for smoking weed.
“I lived on campus, and it was sad for me because I didn’t fit in there,” Nasty says of the school, which did not offer choir or other music-related courses. Luckily, her dorm counselor unlocked her penchant for writing after she found out Rico grew up listening to early 2000s R&B bellwethers such as Erykah Badu, Lauryn Hill, Jill Scott and India.Arie.
“She got me into writing poetry,” Nasty says. “She got me a little diary and I wrote about how I miss my family. It was always some gut-wrenching, painful art.” From there came her first song, a “lo-fi Cali swag lean” track that sounds nothing like what she makes now. Dubbed “Tumblr Famous” after Nasty’s then-love for the proto blogging platform, the track was made on GarageBand on a day she and her classmates decided to skip school to get high on the last day before winter break. She even remembers wearing her uniform in the woods and falling in the mud at one point.
“We got to the house and we made that song and everybody was like, ‘OK, what’s your rap name?’ I didn’t have a rap name – I was just going by my real name,” she says. Rico Nasty was born shortly thereafter, and she began work on her first mixtape. “It was a snowball effect,” she says.
Her influences in those days ranged from Rihanna (the first CD she spent her own money on was Loud) to Joan Jett. “I had the Shrek soundtrack,” she says. “I wanted to play ‘All Star.’ I wanted to play ‘Bad Reputation.’” Tyler, the Creator made an even deeper impact, to the point that Nasty admits she was “bsessed. It was bad. It was the first time I ever stanned someone.” In fact, if you followed the artist on SoundCloud before Rico Nasty blew up, her original handle was NailBog696, which renders the name of Tyler’s second album, Goblin, backwards.
Nasty’s newly released third album, Lethal, her first for new label Fueled by Ramen, shows off a more mature side to her music thanks to following herself instead of the crowd. “This album represents that it’s OK to stand alone,” she says. “It’s an ode to people who are too nice and then reclaiming their power. In everyone’s younger days, we’re constantly looking for approval. Am I doing this right? No one’s doing it right – not even the people we think are doing it right. So, just relieve that pressure off of yourself and worry about the shit you think is cool.”
Rico Nasty’s LETHAL and the extended LETHAL-ER are available now on Atlantic.
