Deadly By Design: Rico Nasty Is Killing It

Rico Nasty Is Killing It

The famously riotous rapper’s new project, LETHAL, comes after a year of reckoning with her real self.

Published on May 1, 2025

by Ben Boddez

Photos by Ermerald Arguelles and Chris Yellen
Design by Erik Grice

If you haven’t been closely following Maryland rapper Rico Nasty, it’s easy to develop a certain image of her. With revved-up, guitar-heavy instrumentals, mosh-pit-ready vocal performances, and fashion choices that often involve spikes and chains, she’s been injecting rockstar chaos into hip-hop ever since her gleefully unapologetic breakout single “Smack A Bitch” dropped in 2018.

Born Maria-Cecilia Kelly, she’s well aware of that perception. Despite first breaking onto the scene with a bubblier, more hyperpop-adjacent sound that she dubbed “Sugar Trap” while getting a little more sentimental on album deep cuts, Kelly talks about recently catching a glimpse of herself in the mirror wearing a rave-ready outfit and developing a worry that “Rico Nasty” had become too much of a character. She was only a teenager when everything started, with aspects created at that time still held over.

Ditching the majority of her wardrobe and management team, Kelly hopped labels and spent a year reckoning with a way to better blend Rico and Maria – which of the old to keep, and which newfound discoveries to incorporate. The result, her third studio album, LETHAL, finds Kelly at her most liberated. That could mean penning an adorable ode to her son, but it could also mean dropping the pretense and letting all that pent-up emotion fly freer than ever before – in the form of going full heavy metal.

When Kelly first appears on our video call, she’s just hopping in the car, returning from dreaming up new aesthetics in a visit to an art store in downtown Los Angeles. “I feel more confident than I’ve ever been,” she says. “I had gotten super comfortable with what people know me for. I always remember trying to navigate wanting to be more feminine and brushing it off as, ‘Oh, I’m not sure.’ I don’t think that younger me genuinely knew how. I feel like it came with age, and it came with learning things about myself.”

If you love the shot of adrenaline that a great Rico Nasty verse – or even just one of her cheeky one-liners – can give you, that’s not going away, either. She’s been looking back on her “Sugar Trap” sound and early mixtapes, bringing back what worked when she was still a young artist finding her footing and attracting fans for the first time.

Early interviews with Kelly often find her giving two separate answers to questions about the songs that made her want to take up rapping: Kreayshawn’s “Gucci Gucci” and Eminem’s “Stan.” They’re two wildly different tracks, but couldn’t be more hilariously appropriate in reflecting Kelly’s two musical sides, blending the angst and storytelling of a hip-hop legend with the DIY vibes and playful energy of an outsider who captured the zeitgeist.

“If I never saw that ‘Gucci Gucci’ video, I would have never thought that I could do it. Everything I had seen prior to that was big music video budgets. It was just her with her Minnie Mouse ears, run and gun, her and the homies. Then ‘Stan’ was the first video that captivated me. I had no idea who he was or what was going on, but I saw the video and was like ‘This is a movie!’”

Of course, Kelly has always been into rock music as well. She has an early alter ego named Trap Lavigne – named after Avril, another inspirational figure for her who she credits with showcasing femininity despite aesthetics that weren’t traditionally seen as such – and religiously played the Guitar Hero series. She was drawn to the character of Midori, decked out in purple pigtails but still shredding.

“I’m actually so good that people don’t want to play with me,” she says. “What was super crazy was when they did Guitar Hero: Aerosmith and they had that song on there with Run-DMC. When I first heard that song, my ears exploded. I was like ‘I need to make something like this!’” After blending it all together, tracks that could have fit right in on some of her early mixtapes, like smooth pop single “On the Low,” now coexist with all-out rap scorchers.

“That [‘Sugar Trap’] era created pillars throughout my entire career that I still stand on, which are scary, fun, cocky. I definitely felt like I could have spent more time just enjoying it and not trying to be the best rapper lyrically, because it really doesn’t matter, it’s all in how you say the stuff,” she says. “I stopped with so much Auto-Tune and I learned my voice, which is something I’m actually proud of. I’m happy that I learned my voice’s limits, and I’m learning about myself as an instrument, rather than just an artist or rapper.”

Another way that Kelly is both evolving from the perception of herself as “just a rapper” and breaking free from old habits is spending less time in the studio. She’s spoken extensively about how much picking up hobbies has allowed her to reflect that authenticity back into her work when she does end up behind the mic. She’ll quickly clarify once again, though, that this doesn’t mean she isn’t overjoyed to live an artist’s lifestyle – just that everything works better in moderation.

“The money, the fun, the partying, the traveling, all of it is a bit much once it’s four years in. You start to be like, ‘Who am I? What do I enjoy doing outside of putting on a show, getting dressed, going to fittings?’” she says. “I picked up Gundams, and that was the first hobby that I was hyper fixated on. Then it stopped being a hyperfixation, because I kept my word and started setting goals for myself, like ‘I’m gonna build three this week.’

“A lot of the goals I have in music, bro, they’re big goals! They’re going to take some time!” she continues. “But when you set goals like that, it just makes you feel so good and the only person that it really matters to is yourself. I’m not going to look back on this moment and be like, ‘Oh my god, I was trapped in the studio that entire time. I don’t even remember what the fucking daylight looked like throughout that rollout.’”

Kelly says that while we still hear a lot from Rico on LETHAL, the tracks where Maria comes out for the first time are “You Could Never” and the closing track “Smile,” where she opens up about her relationship with her son, Cameron. Kelly has always gushed about her son in interviews, but he’s never made it into the music quite like this. She drops a couple lines about how he represents all the best parts of herself.

“He’s funny as hell. I think it’s really cool seeing how he is navigating learning his own personality,” she says. “Whenever I send him to his grandparents, they’re like ‘This boy acts just like you when you were a kid.’ That’s why I think he’s going to be even cooler when he gets older – he’s so curious, interested, and very opinionated, which is like – ‘You are going to be a problem, okay?’ In the best way.”

“Smile” is juxtaposed with tracks like “Smoke Break” (“I wanted to break the sound barrier,” Kelly says about the song), “Son of a Gun” and “Eat Me,” where Kelly might even surprise some longtime fans of her more venomous material with just how raucous she gets on the mic – as well as the tracks that simply serve as an all-out confidence booster. The latter even finds her leading a call-and-response chant with herself: “Who is the best? Me! Who do I love? Me!”

If you continue listening, the next track reveals that it’s a little more focused on giving herself affirmations than a genuine reflection of how she feels on a day-to-day basis. There’s a voice recording on “Butterfly Kisses” of someone reassuring Kelly that it’s fully possible for someone to be romantically interested in her after just a single date. After the recent end of an eight-year relationship, even someone who presents herself as confidently as Kelly does need to be reminded sometimes.

“I don’t always feel like that, so why not make a record that makes you feel like that? Who’s fucking with me – nobody! Get out of my face, I’m a bachelor, proudly admitting all I care about is me,” she says. “Especially as a woman, there’s a sense of ‘Oh, she’s selfish’ when things like that are said, but I take pride in being selfish with my time, being selfish with who I hang around, and being particular with what I share. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. I love me!”

Throughout it all, another thing that’s remained consistent is Kelly’s mentality that becoming the boundary-pushing artist that she has always been doesn’t require a lot of thought or pre-planning. She believes the artists who are truly going to be the ones shifting things and making groundbreaking art are the ones who simply go out every day being unapologetically themselves, a singular energy that nobody is going to be able to copy.

“If you focus too much on doing something, it’s gonna come off as forced. I feel like a lot of this shit is destined and written, and if you push too hard, you might push yourself in the direction you weren’t supposed to go,” she says. “When it comes to pushing boundaries, a lot of the time, I don’t even know what I’m doing until months later and I have a conversation with a homie or a conversation like, ‘You see this? You did that!’ I’m not really doing it like, ‘Oh yeah, when I do this, it’s gonna change all of this.’ Genuinely, I don’t think I have that much power!”

Kelly might be right in one sense, but when it comes to the power of self-awareness and being able to get the most out of life, she’s clearly got it figured out. With LETHAL, she’s built an arsenal of sounds and selves that feel more explosive than ever. It’s not about becoming someone new—it’s about becoming someone whole. When an artist masters their identity, their creativity doesn’t just hit hard. It kills.