Meet RaiNao, Your New Favorite Puerto Rican Artist

Reported by Harper's Bazaar.

Naomi Ramirez Rivera didn't set out to make an album about the senses. She set out to make sense of a childhood. When she was eight years old, her mother enrolled her in a specialized school for the blind in Puerto Rico — one of the only sighted students there. "That's where my whole sensory journey began," she tells Harper's Bazaar. Two decades later, that experience became the architecture for Marcriá, her debut full-length record, named after the Puerto Rican slang for being spoiled. She describes the creative process as excavation: "I tried to transport myself back to specific moments where there was a memory of a taste, a color, an emotion, tied to it — and from there I started creating these arrangements."

The result is an album that feels genuinely physical. Electronic beats dissolve into sacred-sounding choruses. Tambores and panderos spill sideways into salsa. Plena rhythms carry groovy basslines underneath them like a current. RaiNao plays saxophone herself — she studied it at Puerto Rico's Escuela Libre de Música, partly, she admits, because of Lisa Simpson — and traces of jazz surface throughout. Marcriá is the kind of record you put on with salt-stiff hair after a long beach day and let do whatever it wants with your thoughts. It is lusty, grounded, and deeply Puerto Rican without being a postcard of the place.

A Roster Built on Reverence

Nothing about the record is accidental. RaiNao is a precise composer — deliberate about instrumentation, intentional about who she let into the room. The feature list reads like an act of devotion: reggae band Cultura Profética, salsa legend Andy Montañez, and Cuban vocalist Omara Portuondo, who appeared on the seminal Buena Vista Social Club album. "I've been listening to Andy and Omara from the very beginning," she says. "It's a dream to immortalize their voices." She also carved space for independent up-and-comers — Solo Fernández, Matt Louis, Frido Vargas — because emerging doesn't mean forgetting who's still climbing.

RaiNao's entrance into the wider music world came fast and loudly: her 2022 EP ahora A.K.A. Nao caught Bad Bunny's attention, landing her a spot performing at his Puerto Rico shows after Un Verano Sin Ti, and eventually a collaboration on "PERFuMITO NUEVO" from his record-breaking Debi Tirar Mas Fotos. Before all of that, she'd studied film and theater at the Universidad de Puerto Rico, chased an acting career, briefly tried biology. Music, she says, "just slapped me in the face." It always does, with the people it actually wants.

She's careful to note that RaiNao isn't a character — it's just her, with the stage fright turned down and the volume turned up.

Read the original at Harper's Bazaar.