Taken from the Winter 2020 issue. Order your copy now.

“I feel like we’re all living in a Nightmare Vacation.” Rico Nasty — aka Maria Kelly, or RICO BITCH on Zoom — is unpacking the layered meanings behind the title of her debut album. Referencing both the sur- real year we’ve had and the subjectivity of human experience, Nasty tells me it’s a reflection on the duality of light and darkness in life. “My best friend told me something about yin and yang — you’ve got the one side that’s more black than white, you’ve got the other side that’s more white than black. You pick your fate, you know? You want to pay more attention to the vacation side, look at the glass half-full, do that. If you want to be negative and you want to look at this shit like a nightmare, look at it as half-empty, then you can do that too. But at the end of the day, you can’t have one without the other. You can’t have ugly without beauty and you can’t have beauty without ugly. It’s just the way the world works.”

Since dropping her first mixtape in high school, there’s been a duality to Nasty as an artist, too. Pin-balling between ‘sugar trap’ and venomous, provocative pep-talks raging about her haters, the Maryland rapper dreamt up caricature versions of herself to express these alter egos — from the sweet and more sensitive Tacobella, to the audacious, Avril-inspired Trap Lavine.

Nightmare Vacation feels a convergence of both. Over 16 tracks — including a remix and bonus feature of 2018 fan favourite “Smack A Bitch” — she reshapes the record with each song, darting from acerbic, adrenaline-charged taunts on tracks like “Check Me Out”, to playful, more melodic bars on “Loser” and “Don’t Like Me”. Delivering each flow with the animated energy she’s known for, Nasty incites a visceral response that makes you want to ride the waves of the album with her — whether she has you rocking to laid-back “Back & Forth”, or headbanging to high-octane “Let It Out”.

While songs with Aminé, Trippie Redd, Gucci Mane and Don Toliver lean into her softer sound, she introduces a new realm of the Rico Nasty universe in collaborations with Dylan Brady and Laura Les, better known as 100 Gecs. The experimental duo’s influence shines through in the textures of “Let It Out” and “Pussy Poppin”, as does Brady’s hand in the gravelly, futuristic maximalism of “IPHONE”. With robotic auto-tuned vocals, crunchy electronic sounds and lyrics that paint an anxious love story in digital metaphors, the track feels like a continuation of their work on the cyber-pop remix of “ringtone” for 1000 gecs & The Tree of Clues earlier this year.

But it’s Nasty’s partnership with Brady on “OHFR” that’s the standout, seeing Nasty wrap her angsty lyricism around his lurching, siren-laced production. “When we collabed, that felt like they brought me into their world — their way of recording, and stylistically just their sound in general. But for a song like “OHFR”, I feel like I brought them into my world,” she says, comparing their creative process to a seesaw bouncing back influences and ideas.

Reflecting on her own process for the album, Nasty says she turned inwards to drown out expectations rom fans and critics alike — a mindset from which she thinks all of her best music has been made. “That’s what this project is: I stopped thinking about what they would want. That’s why we have songs like “Own It” and we have songs like “IPHONE”, songs that don’t sound like a typical Rico Nasty song,” she explains. “I just want people to understand art is art, and you don’t have to do something because you’re comfortable with it. Being uncomfortable makes you learn way more shit and I’ve learned so much. I’ve been uncomfortable this whole album; I have been nothing but uncomfortable. It’s crazy, because this is the most money I’ve ever had, the nicest place I’ve ever lived, the nicest cars I’ve ever drove, and I’ve been the most stressed I’ve ever been in my life making this project.”

Thinking less about what Rico Nasty would do has been a learning curve coping with quarantine, too. Speaking on the characters she created early on in her career, Nasty considers whether they were a tool she used to feel like somebody else — the “type of girl” she saw successful female rappers like Nicki Minaj embody when she was a teen — in moments of insecurity and self-doubt. “You might look at a lot of other interviews and I’ll probably answer this question a lot differently, but quarantine definitely shows you a lot about a person. I feel like it showed me more about myself than anything,” she muses. “It did become sort of a costume. It was like I would wake up stressed about my real life and shit that was just too much, and I would put on whatever outfit Rico or Tacobella would fucking wear and just carry on my day worried about whatever Rico Nasty needed to be worried about. Then, when I got home from work in the hotel and I’d take my wig [and] my makeup off, it was just me looking at myself like ‘Is this even real’? So many people look up to me because they say I’m so real and I’m so honest, but for so long I really did hide behind my makeup and certain things because I was scared of people knowing what I really looked like, or not liking what I really looked like. It was just a really sad time, honestly.”

Spending the first part of lockdown at home in Maryland, Nasty was forced to face her days without the bravado of costumes and performances and being constantly on the go. “You really be looking at yourself sometimes like ‘Yo, I really don’t want to be this person, please put my wig back on’. You can feel like a lion with no mane, like a fish out of water,” she says. “That’s when I really started noticing ‘OK, this is obviously a coping mechanism’. There’s something wrong with me taking off my clothes and I feel like I lost my power. There’s a problem with me taking off my watches and my chains and my wig and my makeup and I feel like, soulless. That’s a problem, that’s not cute… So I just really had to buckle down and talk to God. I’ve been talking to God like all the time.”

While Nasty’s bravado is still integral to her persona as an artist, separating her identity at home and on stage has made her all the more excited to perform again without using her audiences as a crutch. “I catch myself — I put expectations on my fans… I would have such a shitty day and I would go on stage and expect these people to fucking make me feel better,” she admits. “You’re right, they’re not your crutch. They’re not that. They like what you do and some of them look up to you; they’re not here to give you literal superpowers and you’re just this great person. And I really look forward to doing the shows now. I miss them like friends, like going out with my friends, not like I’m releasing all this fucking pain and I’m mad and all this frustration.”

Without forfeiting the passion that makes Nasty’s music so cathartic, she says rethinking her message is a shift towards a more positive energy exchange between her and her fans. “Making this project, in the beginning, I’m like ‘Why am I so negative? Why am I so low? Why do I feel so drained?’ And that’s why — because I’m putting out energy in a place where it doesn’t belong. I should be feeding them positivity and power, not ‘Oh God, I’m so angry and we’re just going to be angry together,’” she explains. “I’m telling these girls ‘Get mad, express yourself, feel this, feel that’. Yes, feel that, but also have a brain behind it and understand your motive for things. Just don’t be a bitch. Being a bitch is so overrated, bro.”

Adapting to lockdown restrictions while finishing Nightmare Vacation pushed Nasty out of her comfort zone artistically as well, forcing her to take control and find confidence in conquering things she wasn’t sure she could do. “Quarantine, more than anything, really just taught me ‘You can do it’. As much as half of you doesn’t want to do it and the other half of you doesn’t think you can do it, you can literally do it,” she says, referencing the Brady-produced video for “IPHONE” — in which she appears as a trippy CGI avatar — which was shot over 14 hours in her basement back in April. “Obviously I’ve directed some of my music videos before, but it was just on a whim. I never had a shot sheet and a call list, everything that I had to get. It’s a lot that I learned, a lot of shit I was so afraid to do. I just bit the bullet and it started becoming my favourite thing.”

Nasty admits she felt insecure about other artists’ output at the time, too. “This is really deep, but some- times I let how somebody else’s success looks throw me off how hard I’m working. I noticed that really early on into quarantine — I’m working so hard on my album and I’m freaking out about everything, and then I’m going on Apple Music and people are dropping projects. I’m like ‘Bitch, am I missing something?!’”

Making lists, bullet-pointing plans and focusing her energy on what she could control helped her push past that fear of failure, reconnecting with the self-belief that saw her break into the industry in the first place. Though she credits studio sessions with her rapper father as her first introduction to the music world, growing up in the DMV was an experience far removed from the accessibility of the industry in New York or LA, and Nasty is an artist who had to carve out space for herself. Break- ing it down, she credits her upbringing as an only child for her independence, her early years spent around people from “so many different ways of life” for her intuition, and her star sign — “I’m a Taurus, so girl, I’m stubborn” — for her conviction to follow through on both.

Her fans have connected with the fight in her music from the start, and for many of them Nasty represents the resilience and attitude of the female rock stars she grew up idolising. She’s wary of being put on a pedestal or lauded as a role model (“I’m 23 just like the next bitch, I have no idea what I’m doing”), but she hopes they will listen to Nightmare Vacation and feel powerful. “Which is something that I always feel like they gain with a project of mine — some sort of self-confidence, that sense of ‘OK, I can fucking conquer the world’. I keep seeing these tweets that my music makes people that have never been in a fight before feel like they could kick somebody’s ass. So that’s really what I want from this project: I want people to gain power.”

More than anything, though, the record represents finding her own power. In “Girl Scouts”, she makes peace with a question she was often asked at the start of her career: How do you feel about people stealing your sound or dressing like you? “It just put this stigma on me like everybody wants to be like me, everybody wants to copy me,” Nasty says. “It filled my ego up and made me feel powerless.” Letting go of the fear that other artists would compromise her individuality or undercut her success, “Girl Scouts” proclaims her newfound security in inspiring a whole wave of emerging rappers.

“When you step back and look at a painting from a distance, versus up close, you can see everything,” is how she describes this change in perspective. “That is, I feel, what my kind of legacy is — up close it just looks like I’m a female rapper in the sea with a bunch of others, but when you take a step back, you can clearly see that I’ve already influenced a whole genre of female rap. It doesn’t feel like people are copying me anymore; it feels like I’m building up an army. I’m building up a story that, years from now, people are going to say ‘Yo, when she came out, shit was different […] I thought about that shit in my head, in my room, alone, and they liked that shit? My power is within, and can’t nobody take it from me.”

Despite her confidence in the album and her standing as an artist, up close in this moment Nasty says her overriding feeling about its release is anxiety — even speculating that if it’s not received as well as she hopes, she’ll be forgotten. But by embracing that duality — of doubt and pride, the nightmare and vacation — Nasty is leading by example in embodying the message of the project itself. Until then, she’ll be minding her business back at home, turning off her phone, and trusting that anyone who’s ever connected with her will embrace it too.