Rico Nasty Cycles Back to Kenny Beats, Testing If Exhaustion Looks Like Evolution

Rico Nasty has announced a new album, RX, produced with Kenny Beats and featuring Dylan Brady from 100 Gecs.

The project arrives after a three-year gap since her last release. Already the reunion with Beats has triggered the familiar script. Was this artistic evolution or commercial retreat?

The question assumes one direction has integrity and the other doesn't. But the pattern is worth tracing—in 2018, after her early hyperpop-adjacent projects stalled commercially, Rico pivoted to boom-bap and boom-trap production with Kenny Beats and producer Kaytranada.

That bet didn't land the way a pivot is supposed to. Streaming numbers plateaued and the audience she'd built with Nasty and Lاز didn't follow her into that sonic territory. By 2020, she'd shifted again, chasing a more immediate, TikTok-friendly sound. Each collaboration, each producer swap, each aesthetic reset followed the same arc. They retreated from a direction that hadn't yielded the numbers and repackaged it as forward motion.

Now Kenny Beats is back—the same producer who marked the first failed pivot. What does this signal? Not artistic reclamation, that's the story we tell ourselves when an artist returns to an old collaborator. What it actually signals is depletion. When creative bets fail to move the market, artists often cycle backward toward something that once worked, or toward the producer who seemed to understand their voice, or toward whoever will work with them when the momentum has slowed.

The Dylan Brady feature complicates this only slightly. Brady's presence suggests Rico is still chasing a post-genre moment, still believing the audience wants hyperpop-adjacent eclecticism. But Dylan Brady succeeded where Rico's earlier experiments didn't because 100 Gecs had speed and virality on their side. They moved faster than the market could articulate what it wanted. Rico has never had that velocity.

If RX lands, the narrative will rewrite itself immediately. Evolution. Artistic growth. Return to form. But the structural truth beneath the reunion is simpler and more mortal. It is an artist testing whether the past might work again.