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 Bitch,” which kicked open the doors to a dominant new era of “rapper as rockstar.” At a time when female rappers dressed like WWE wrestlers, Rico was serving Sex 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. After too many years of second-guessing her own instincts, it struck Rico that it was finally time to get back to the basics—which meant coming to terms with why people loved her in the first place. “They like my music for bars. They like when I make them laugh,” she says. “They want to hear me boast, because they’re listening to that shit as if it’s them. And they want to hear bangers.” And so, without overthinking it, she reconnected with Kenneth Blume (formerly Kenny Beats), the in-demand producer with whom she made 2019’s groundbreaking Anger Management—the surprise-release mixtape that changed both artists’ careers. “I missed someone that was honest with me,” Rico explains. “And I missed someone who knew me back then, before I had any success. I felt like if I’m going to get back to doing me, I should go back to someone who can be real with me, somebody who’s not too serious or draining. Sometimes it feels like people are trying to chase the shit that we did when we worked together. So it just felt like, if I’m going to make rap music, then I’m gonna do it right and go to Kenny.” 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.”) Among Rx’s tracklist are wild experiments like the Dylan Brady-produced “BUTTHEAD” and bouncy, girly bangers like “CUPCAKE,” but the album’s most quintessential track might be “KISS N MAKE UP.” “That song is exactly how I felt for years, like a dog chasing her tail,” says Rico, looking back on how she often tried to force an evolution when all along, she just had to accept herself. “The title is like, me and all my personalities are fighting—now let’s all kiss and make up and go back to what the fuck we normally do. Stop trying to do all this other stuff and go back to what we know.” Hence the fun bars and chirpy “Yeah, yeah, yeah” adlibs, which real fans will remember from the Tales of Tacobella days. “I think it’s just an ode to my old self—to never change,” says Rico. “Rx is about something being prescribed, and what I’m prescribing is confidence. I think that confidence can make or break you, and I think it’s made and broke me a couple of times,” she adds with a laugh. “But I also think the realest thing that a person can do is be themselves. The ‘x’ in Rx stands for infinity—so I’ma always be here.”