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Photo Credit: Chris Yellen

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RICO NASTY
returns + announces
new album
LETHAL

OUT MAY 16th ON FUELED BY RAMEN (ATLANTIC MUSIC GROUP)

Releases new single
“TEETHSUCKER (YEA3x)”

​LISTEN | WATCH

LISTEN HERE | PRE-RODER/PRE-SAVE HERE

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Rico Nasty returns with the announcement of a new studio album, LETHAL due out May 16th on Fueled by Ramen (Atlantic Music Group). To mark the occasion she has dropped the first single – a rap rock banger titled “TEETHSUCKER (YEA3X).”

“‘TEETHSUCKER (YEA3x)’ was both the first song I wrote for the album, and the first song I ever wrote with Imad Royal, who executive produced LETHAL,” Rico shares, “We all knew this song was special from the moment we turned it in. And what’s a better way to start the new era than by poppin out like a titty????” Fans can pre-order the album now HERE.

Always the rap world’s biggest rock star, Rico Nasty is known for her own particular brand of rage-rap and for her outrageous on-stage, online, volume-up persona. But as she grew up, she started to feel trapped by the character she created. LETHAL is a reckoning of who Rico is at 27 with the trap-pop teen persona she created more than a decade ago. Executive produced by GRAMMY nominated producer Imad Royal, the album still features all the hallmarks of a Rico Nasty record – female rage, heavy guitars, humor – but there are also notes of femininity, introspection and a more complex framing of all the angles of Rico – the performer, the mother, the adult. 

LETHAL is Rico Nasty’s third studio album following her debut album, Nightmare Vacation and her 2022 follow-up to Las Ruinas. She began writing songs as a teenager in Washington D.C., quickly becoming a YouTube and Soundcloud star. In addition to her three full length albums, she’s released two EP’s and seven mix-tapes along with countless singles and collaborations with a veritable “whose who” of music stars including Doechii, Megan Thee Stallion, Denzel Curry, Schoolboy Q, ASAP Ferg, Lil Yachty, Gucci Mane, Kali Uchis, Don Toliver, Dylan Brady, Kenny Beats, Flo Milli, 100 Gecs and more. Rico Nasty was named as part of the 2018 XXL Freshman Class and skyrocketed to fame with her breakout hit “Smack A Bitch.” Since then she’s appeared on numerous film and television soundtracks and in multiple brand campaigns along with appearances on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, Tiny Desk and more.

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More About Rico Nasty
LETHAL
​By Brittany Spanos

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 bubbly melodies, rage raps, and skull-rattling beats, 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 kind of vocal cord-shredding mosh-rap you hear everywhere today. 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. But for Rico, the aesthetic wasn’t a costume or a phase. It’s one thing to dress like a rockstar — to be a rockstar is another.

Scan your favorite new rap playlist and you’ll hear a generation of up-and-coming artists inspired by Rico’s balance of high-femme trap-pop and nu-metal rage rap. But around the time of her last record, 2022’s Las Ruinas, the innovator felt trapped: “I was caught in the space of wanting to be understood by the masses, but also recognizing that maybe I’m not supposed to be.” She’d started to feel pigeonholed by her own outré persona, which hadn’t changed much since she’d stepped into the role of Rico Nasty as a teen. “I felt like I was living in character,” the 27-year old admits today. “And when I first started, that was the whole idea of it — but that gets exhausting.” Backstage at last year’s headlining tour, she caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror dressed as a teenage raver. “No shade, but dude, you’re 26,” she recalls thinking. “When are you going to grow up?”

So began Rico Nasty’s year of reckoning, which began as a conscious free-fall. “I just completely let life take me: letting myself indulge in things that made me excited, living real life experiences,” she says. She cleared her closet of the things that made her feel stuck at age 19, ditching the Demonia boots for grown-and-sexy heels. She dove deep into books, deleted social media from her phone, and started taking therapy seriously. For years, she’d withstood label pressure to give her songs more pop appeal or hop on passing trends. Now, working on the songs that would become LETHAL, Rico felt like she had back in the Sugar Trap days, before she’d known how bittersweet the industry could be. In short, she says: “I reconnected to myself.”

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Meanwhile she’d parted ways with her entire management team, flying solo until an opportunity to perform with Paramore in summer 2023 introduced her to her new team. Rico had been signed to Atlantic Records since 2018, but dreamed of being “somewhere a little bit more edgy, where I had more space to grow and be whoever I felt like being.” When her new team mentioned Fueled By Ramen, the alternative label who launched bands like Fall Out Boy and Panic! at the Disco into the mainstream, Rico panicked that she’d be misunderstood: “I’m a rapper, and I want to be remembered as a rapper.” Instead, the label instructed Rico to stay true to no one but herself.

LETHAL, Rico’s third studio album and her first for Fueled By Ramen, arrives this May as the grown-up evolution of the “sugar trap” sound. But where her early work was girly, the 15-track LETHAL is all woman, presenting her signature hard/soft duality at its sexiest, coolest, and most confident. Executive produced by Imad Royal, the Grammy-nominated producer known for his work with The Chainsmokers and Panic! at the Disco, the album balances playfully sophisticated songs that draw from the divine feminine (“Pink,” “Butterfly Kisses”) with tracks like “Teethsucker” and “Soul Snatcher” that channel monster truck show energy and establish Rico as a true originator of the rap-rock revival. “I’m putting my flag on the moon: This is my shit. This is what I do,” she says with pride. “It’s not an act. It’s not a phase. It’s not something I’m doing to promote my album. This been the vibe.”

Gone are the days when being Rico Nasty felt like playing a character. With LETHAL, Rico’s embodying main character energy instead. “This album is about being confident and saying fuck everybody else,” she says. “It’s about getting doors slammed in your face and people telling you to try it their way again and again, and you stay true to yourself and it works. That’s what this project is. It’s an ode to yourself.”

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Photo Credit: Chris Yellen

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Follow RICO NASTY
​Website – Instagram – Twitter – Facebook

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AMNPLIFY – DB