Largo, MD · rap · punk-rap

Rico Nasty

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Sugar-trap screamo-rap pioneer — DMV hometown chaos, joyfully unhinged, whisper-to-shriek whiplash as a signature and a live show running on pure adrenaline.

Rico Nasty was born Maria-Cecilia Simone Kelly in 1997 in Largo, Maryland, the only child of a Puerto Rican mother and an African-American father who was himself a rapper and introduced her to the music. She was raised across Prince George's County, New York, Virginia and Washington, D.C., and at eleven moved to Palmer Park, Maryland, where she was enrolled in a boarding school. She was expelled at fourteen for smoking marijuana and transferred to Charles Herbert Flowers High School, where her music career began not long after her father was imprisoned and her parents divorced.

She released her first mixtape, Summer's Eve, in tenth grade, followed by The Rico Story and Sugar Trap in 2016. The single "iCarly" passed half a million YouTube views, and "Hey Arnold" was remixed with Lil Yachty, a pairing that returned in 2017 for "Mamacita" on the Fate of the Furious soundtrack. Her 2017 mixtape Tales of Tacobella drew notice for showing off her singing as much as her rapping.

That year's single "Poppin" was featured on HBO's Insecure, and the mixtape Sugar Trap 2 was named among Rolling Stone's best rap releases of 2017. In 2018 the singles "Smack a Bitch," "Poppin" and "Key Lime OG" each passed ten million views and spread further through TikTok memes, leading to a deal with Atlantic Records and the mixtape Nasty.

The Kenny Beats collaboration Anger Management followed in 2019, then her first studio album, Nightmare Vacation, in 2020, which reached the Heatseekers chart, and a second album, Las Ruinas, in 2022.

She later left Atlantic for Fueled by Ramen and Elektra Records, releasing her third studio album, Lethal, in 2025.

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