By the time Rico Nasty snarled her way into the spotlight with Nasty in 2018, she had already made it clear she wasn’t interested in containment. Not by genre, not by decorum, not by expectation. She’s the artist who’s allergic to repetition; more than a rapper, more than a punk, more than the hyperpop-adjacent trap nihilist people tried to box her in as. Her alchemy of sugar-trap’s giddy rush and punk’s raw-nerve abrasiveness has carved a space few contemporaries could comfortably inhabit, let alone command with such consistent, feral charisma. 

Her early work fused trap brattiness with punk textures, then swerved into genreless rapture on Nightmare Vacation, before slipping into a somewhat underappreciated zone of shadow-pop introspection on Las Ruinas. With Lethal, her first album in three years and her first since parting ways with Atlantic, Rico offers her most pointed reintroduction: jagged, wild-eyed, and gloriously unhinged. There’s an implicit understanding that Maria Kelly isn’t mellowing, but perhaps sharpening her multifaceted assault, aiming her special brand of chaos at an even broader canvas. The question, then, is how these new dimensions manifest.

With its place in the latter half of Lethal, “Say We Did” offers a fascinating glimpse of this refined Nasty. It’s not soft, obviously Rico doesn’t do soft, but it is vulnerable in its own blistered way. Over a skeletal, fuzzy guitar loop that recalls the bedroom grunge of early 2010s Tumblrcore (yes, that’s a genre now), she raps in a register that seems half-drunk on self-doubt, half-drunk on conviction. Lyrically, the song is a Rosetta Stone for her dual obsessions: glamour and control. “Pull up with another one like, ooh, ooh / And you know I had to buy two” sets the tone. 

Rico’s allure is that she still makes contradiction feel dangerous. On this album, the rockstar plunges headfirst into her most stylized, guitar-slashed soundscape yet: a record that fuses bratty opulence with nu-metal grime, tapping into the gaudy rage of turn-of-the-millennium alt-radio while sounding unmistakably like now. It’s a maximalist work, proudly unhinged, swerving between brat-punk anthems and digital distortion.