A few years ago, Rico Nasty’s unique style of rap was making her one of the most interesting and exciting voices in hip-hop. Jonny Pierce, frontman of the Drums, saw her do an interview with Narduwar where she mentioned that she was really into his band’s music growing up.
“When she mentioned the Drums, her whole body just kind of softened and she became very, almost a little bit shy and sweet,” Pierce remembers of the interview. “And so, I could tell she really meant that, she really does love the Drums. So, it was so touching to me.”
Years later, as Pierce was working on Jonny, the Drums’ sixth album, Rico’s team reached out about doing a collab. “It was perfect timing and serendipitous,” he says now — he had the perfect song in the works for a collaboration with her.
“I had this track sitting there where I had already figured out what the chorus was, but I was letting nature do its thing,” Pierce says. It ended up being the song “Dying,” which was released last Friday alongside the album. He sent the track over to Rico, and she instantly loved it.
Pierce flew out to Los Angeles so they could record her vocals, and the two had “the best session I’ve ever had in my life,” he says. “I felt like I could cry. And I did cry when she was doing her part.”
“We ended up just talking for hours before we recorded a single note. She just opened her heart in a way that I wasn’t expecting her to do,” Pierce adds. “And I felt really able to share some of my heart, too. And we both got pretty emotional in this session, and then we recorded, and it was just the most effortless thing I’ve ever seen.”
Pierce says their collaboration has led to an unexpected friendship with Rico, and that they’ve become “a little closer” through the entirety of making the project.
“We’re both weirdos, but I’ve learned to be kind of an extrovert when I need to be,” he says. “It’s something I developed as a child for survival. And I think there may be something there for her too, that people know her as kind of agro-rapper, but there’s a whole ‘nother person there underneath it all. Both parts are very beautiful. They’re just very different.”
“Dying” is one of the standout songs on Jonny, a project that came together during a period of deep introspection and healing for Pierce, who’s long grappled with childhood trauma in his music. In the song’s lyrics, he sings to his younger self and says the things he wishes his family had told him growing up.
Specifically, Pierce points to the shortest songs on the LP: “Harms” and “Little Jonny” as tentpoles for the LP. The first sees the singer, backed by church-like sonics, open up about the anger and frustration of not being loved by his family as a child. Then, on “Little Jonny,” Pierce sings from the perspective of “Mama Jonny,” the manifestation of his inner mother, where he reminds himself, “If you want to cry, I will holds you.”
“One is the anger and the frustration, the rage, and the little boy crying out that he was not loved and that he struggles every day,” he says. “And then, kind of out of nowhere, the whole thing flips, and suddenly we’re in this cozy nest with a mother and a child. And Mama Jonny is there with Little Jonny. They’re both me. I think that moment where those songs switch from pain to healing, I think it’s a moment that if I look back at everything I’ve ever made, it feels like I made it all for that moment.”
Like with the lyrics on the two songs, the visuals for the project are similarly striking — the images are nude self-portraits he took inside his childhood home around the time he made his most recognized album, Portamento, a decade ago. One day, he decided to head to his small hometown in upstate New York and sneak into the house where he grew up with some cameras.
“As soon as I got into the house, without making a decision, I just started disrobing. And I didn’t know why, but I felt like I needed to,” Pierce says. “I took these portraits in places where there were memories of trauma inflicted on me. Even when I was taking the photos, there was something that felt like reclaiming power in a place where I had no power at one time.”
“I’ve just always got that part of me that’s a bit rebellious, and so there was that part too,” he adds. Jonny’s album cover sees the singer nude, kneeling and leaning against an office chair in prayer.
Looking back at the decade-old photos today, Pierce wonders whether the images are really “taking back his power” or if there’s a layer of darkness to them too, almost like a form of Stockholm Syndrome. “There’s a million places to go be naked, and I chose to go to the place of my abuser. I wonder if in that moment, maybe two things were happening at once,” he says. “Maybe I was trying to reclaim something, but at the same time, maybe there was a desire to feel even powerless in those spaces again — drawn to my pain as a child and being in that same space.”
Grappling with those feelings in his music and in the imagery for the record has been cathartic. But he also doesn’t know how to make art in any other way besides committing to vulnerability and honesty: “The other option for me feels like death,” he says.
He hopes that the complicated themes on the record “don’t scare people away” but he hopes that it touches those who need to listen to it.
“Maybe this is an album that isn’t to be shared with the masses or big groups of people can sit down and just listen to it together. Maybe this new album, Jonny, is for the headphones and for closing your door and putting on the vinyl, and just being alone with it,” he says. “That actually feels like a beautiful way to experience this album.”