Rico Nasty assures me she isn’t a “punk rocker,” but her idol is Joan Jett, the so-called godmother of punk. The 21-year-old Maryland rapper recalls hearing “Bad Reputation” for the first time as a preteen, during a scene in Shrek, and being hooked instantly. “I used to play Joan Jett all the time. Then, the movie The Runaways came out,” she explains, her voice speeding up with excitement. “It was a wrap from there. I was a rebellious little bitch ever since.”

Maybe Rico isn’t technically punk, but she broke out in 2016 with cartoon-inspired SoundCloud rap anchored by pop-punk melodies, akin to the stylings of Lil Uzi Vert. On her recent full-length Nasty, she leans into a persona she likes to calls “Trap Lavigne.” She spits out words with contempt and edges into the most hoarse areas of her voice, setting these verses against hard-hitting beats and occasional distorted guitar. In her video for “Rage,” she unleashes all of her unruly energy in a cathartic performance, head-banging and screaming with demonic fervor. She doesn’t hold back in the lyrics, either: “You a fuckin’ donkey, I’mma let this choppa pin your tail,” she shouts.

When I meet Rico for the first time at Pitchfork’s office in the World Trade Center, she is no longer the intimidator. Instead, she is quiet, standing in an oversized Marilyn Manson T-shirt and baby-pink slides from Rihanna’s Fenty Puma line, taking in the expansive view of lower Manhattan. “I don’t think I’ve ever been up this high,” she remarks in a soft voice. But when she begins playing raucous, hard-edged songs from Nasty, she comes out of her shell, rattling off stories about how the tracks came together and her parents’ varying reactions to her music and her burgeoning fame.

After she plays the single “Countin Up,” a remake of N.O.R.E.’s 1998 Neptunes-produced hit “Superthug,” she explains that it is an homage to her dad, who used to be a rapper called Beware. Her dad first played her “Superthug” when she was three years old, she tells me the following week by phone. “When he was in the car, he turned the music down to make sure I was singing,” she says. “And I was singing! I knew all the words.” She became known as one of those children who can perform on cue, anywhere, anytime. (“People used to be like, ‘Yo, could you sing the N.O.R.E. song?’ I used to be like, ‘What, what, what, what, what…’”) She regularly put on shows in her parents’ living room, where she would dress up and perform elaborate routines set to hits by Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, and Spice Girls.