Artists You Should Know: RaiNao

Over the last few years, Puerto Rican artist RaiNao has materialized as a luminary new voice within the male-saturated landscape of urbano. Equipped with an ear deftly capable of contorting the traditions and styles that boundary the Latin music diaspora into propulsive and revelatory anthems, the 29-year-old is poised to realize her goal of “changing the color” of the genre. She arrives as a colorific catalyst, injecting her own vivid and revolutionary pigments into the sounds that emanate from the island she was raised on.

^{This post may contain affiliate links. Ads and affiliate links are how independent blogs like Grimy Goods can operate and pay our staff. Thank you for supporting our work and being a part of our music community.}

Growing up in the San Juan neighborhood of Santurce, Naomi Ramirez Rivera was moved by the sounds of soul, jazz, rap, timba, and reggaetón she found herself surrounded by. But she also watched her father as he earnestly pursued a career as a performer and musician, eagerly following him to his gigs as a salsa singer. An adolescent shyness kept her from exploring her own voice while attending the Escuela Libre de Música so she opted for music theory and learned how to play the saxophone.

Like her rocketing ascension to international acclaim, the decision to start making and releasing music was just as rapidly made by Rivera, who was a University of Puerto Rico biology major at the time. All it took was three failed attempts to pass a mathematics course, and she was out — waving goodbye to her future as a surgeon and embracing a passion for the arts as a theater and audiovisual production major. The decision proved to be a slippery slope, guiding her toward the eventual realization that music would be an irreplaceable outlet for her prodigious creative output.

“There is no right time, there is RaiNao,” she proclaims as a personal maxim. With that same sense of magnetic urgency, she unleashed her first track as a reggae-spun cover of “He Tratado” in 2020. The spur-of-the-moment introduction opened a floodgate of creativity as each new single broadened her sound — evolving from a “rockera” to a “timbera.” Amidst all that shifting she threads messages of rousing empowerment, igniting all the sensuality, romance, and passion of her intoxicatingly rhythmic music.

If you plan on diving into her discography, ahora A.K.A. Nao (2022) is the ideal place to start. Clocking at just under twenty-five minutes the eight-track collection offers a swift but formidable portrait of a RaiNao boldly assured by their prowess as an artist. Delivering swift bravado over roiling beats and sizzling guitars (“Sukhoi”) alongside torrid exultations of queer love that drift between throbbing club bangers and dreamy alt-pop ballads (“Plug,” “Mi Piscis”). The EP affirmed that a RaiNao was here to terraform the soundscapes of urbano into something more reflective of the fluid diversity and modulations inherent to Latine spaces.

The arrival of her debut album CAPICÚ earlier this year has all but launched her experimentalism and singular musical mind into fervid new territories. Doubling the size of her previous project all sixteen songs put on spectacular display RaiNao’s radical entanglement of everything from the kineticism of pop and dancehall to the infectiously off-kilter percussive rhythms of reggaeton, salsa, and perreo. The entire record radiates with a hot-and-heavy desire that gushes from both its pulsating beats and cascades of eclectic instrumentals.

“Y quiero con todo mi fucking corazón que mi música les haga querer ser mejores personas también,” she tells us on “Naomi,” one of the album’s spoken word interludes. The song outlines many of the guiding beliefs and impassioned purposes that Rivera has not just for her music but for herself as a human being. True art connects people by illuminating the parts of ourselves we hide away, urging expression and growth unfettered by shame or ridicule. The music of RaiNao does just that, impelling an obliteration of limitation through artistic ecstasy.