Review: LETHAL Is Rico Nasty Unfiltered — And Unmatched

LETHAL gives us Rico Nasty at her best yet. With 15 tracks and 34 minutes, these mixtape-length songs could second Pink Pantheress in the list of girls who will give you excellence in as short a song as possible.

The transitions throughout the album are also on point. Masterful engineering seamlessly blends the first three tracks into one another. Rico gives us her traditional raver girl, while showing more softness and vulnerability. Opening track “WHO AM I” and its follow-up “TEETHSUCKER” feel more like the Rico we’ve gotten over the past decade. But then there’s “CAN’T WIN EM ALL”,  a pop song that touches a side of Rico’s music sensibilities I haven’t heard before - a side I would love to see more of. In the song, she shares her experience dealing with the loss of someone you put your faith in. Some things you gotta let go, Rico reminds us over deep bass, energetic percussion, and some of her best singing vocals yet.

With this project, she does display a certain amount of expansion into different sounds. “PINK” takes me back to late Amala/Hot Pink era Doja Cat.  Still, Rico reminds us that she is the OG punk of rap. ”Need a rockstar bitch, let me know/ Mosh pit shit get the bodies rolling” she says in “SOUL SNATCHER”.  In the follow-up song “GRAVE,”  she references “PG” - Prince George’s County, Maryland - where she’s from, reminding us that she put PG on the map, which one could say, given that Wale is mostly affiliated with DC and the DMV as a whole.

After a couple rounds of top-to-bottom listens, I ask myself, Where are the low points? Where does the sound get disjointed? Where does the production feel cheap? Where does the lyrical precision diminish? And truthfully, it doesn’t. The beat production is solid. The flow between the songs and the songs themselves are written with a particular finesse. Could the songs be longer? As good as they are, they could’ve been, but fan service doesn’t necessitate critique. 

This follow-up from 2022’s Las Ruinas is a profound example of artistic freedom. Rico doesn’t have to sell a complex narrative or story. The story is simply “I’m a bad bitch and nobody compares. Look at this shit I started,” and it’s completely true. The lack of features on the album only seems to cement the idea that this project is Rico at her finest. In the 11 years of releasing music, through the ups and downs, Rico has stayed true to herself, developing her craft while staying true to her core, and we’re better for it.