TOKISCHA ALTAGRACIA PERALTA, the superstar Dominican rapper who goes by her first name, broke out in 2018 with a series of raunchy, riotously funny singles that suggested she was not just a sublimely talented MC but also a viper-tongued comedian. Few rappers working right now are as giggle-inducingly filthy: "I got a thug in my room/He fucks me in the kitchen,” she boasts on one song; on another, she brags that "this ass is addictive, like 2K".

Her boldness and humour, in a culture that centres on modesty and religion, have meant that in just a few years Tokischa has become one of the Dominican Republic's most iconic pop stars. Her fans call her the "Popola Presidente” (Pussy President) and, thanks to co-signs from Rosalía and FKA twigs, it feels as though the rest of the world is about to fall at her feet, too. Like so many of history's great comedians, Tokischa's sense of fun masks a dark past and the demons she's been struggling with for many years. "By 19," she says, "I was already on the street—corrupted, let's say.”

Amor y Droga (Love and Drugs), her long-awaited debut album, represents a kind of origin story for the 29-year-old rapper, chronicling a five-year relationship that preceded her music career, during which she found herself caught up in "the junkie life" with a boyfriend who introduced her to hard drugs. Touching on dembow as well as rock, pop, and electronic music, Amor y Droga is more musically varied than fans might expect from Tokischa, from the postpunk of 'Lola' to the throbbing spoken-word house turn-on 'Droga de Diseñador'. In the era of her life that inspired the album, she explains, she was going to a lot of techno parties. "So, I have a lot of techno [on there]. And there's rap, too, because I started my career as a rapper, doing trap. Of course, there's dembow—that's the Dominican genre that I represent the most.”

Amor y Droga is a raw and sometimes sombre account of addiction and rebirth, inspired by her sobriety and her desire for fans to understand who she is. "I don't really know what they're gonna think, but I want them to understand where I come from," she says. "I'm at a more conscious stage in my life, where I'm really thinking about everything that I went through—I guess it will give them a little bit of context for why I am the way that I am. I hope that I'm a little more understood now because I've been misunderstood a lot with my art."

Speaking over the phone from Miami, Tokischa sounds considered and introspective, a far cry from the woman who has drunk from a dog bowl onstage and sparked a political firestorm after staging a provocative photo shoot in front of a mural of the Virgin Mary. ("It was like this concept of: I'm a whore, but I believe in God, and I have faith," she recalls. "The church hated me—they wanted to put me in jail!") Although Christmas is only a few days away, she and her team have been working nonstop in anticipation of Amor y Droga's 2026 release. “I'm just having some meetings and doing the plan for the rest of the year and next year," she tells me. "It's been cute, but I can't wait to go back home."

Tokischa was born in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, and raised in what she describes as "the hood". Her mother moved to the United States when Tokischa was three years old, in an attempt to create a better life; she was raised mostly by extended family, as her father was in and out of prison for much of her childhood. She says she's always had the rebellious streak that runs through her music, which didn't make life easy in the highly religious Dominican Republic. "As a teenager, you go to school, you do a lot of things—and when you're from the hood school, the system is not very strict," she says. "I used to have sex in the [toilets]. The teachers were harassing kids. The other kids were selling drugs in school. I made a song about that, and I got the whole system of education in the country mad at me."

When Tokischa was 19, she moved out of home and began living "on the streets", with no job and not much in the way of a support system. She started dating a guy she describes as a drug addict and moved in with him. "I realised, [within] the first month of being in that house with him, that he just wanted to do drugs every day. I didn't want that, but I got hooked, too."

Tokischa spent the next five years "literally living the junkie life". If she didn't have money for drugs, she would latch onto whoever did; when she went to the studio or performed live, she was likely high and/or drunk. In 2017, she came to the realisation that this wasn't how she wanted her life to be. One day, she went to the studio without the influence of drugs and realised she was sharper and more productive. From that point, Tokischa locked herself into music; she's been drug-free since January 2020 and sober from alcohol for two years. With quitting drugs, she says, came a change in subject matter: “When I started making music, I was doing drugs, so I was making music about drugs," she says. "And then I started making music when I was really horny, after not doing drugs and not having a boyfriend, and that's the type of music that got me really big. I guess people are really horny, too."

That five-year span, from Tokischa's introduction to drugs to her quitting, is what inspired Amor y Droga, which is heavier and more inward-looking than much of what Tokischa has put out to date. She says she couldn't have found the clarity to make the record without her sobriety. "I grew spiritually, and I understood what I wanted to do and everything," she says. “I feel like I wanted to tell this story because that's the part of me that really struggled the most and drove me to success."

To say Tokischa has found the success she craved at that time is an understatement. She is one of the Dominican Republic's most recognisable and beloved stars—without even releasing an album—despite the many controversies that have surrounded her. Tokischa has been labelled the "Dominican Madonna" because of her many clashes with the religious establishment and the Dominican government—a nickname that became even more prescient when she collaborated with the pop icon on a remix of her classic 'Hung Up'. Every night during her career-spanning Celebration Tour, Madonna performed a portion of the remix, with a video of Tokischa performing her verse on FaceTime. The Dominican singer describes her relationship with Madonna as "just iconic, priceless". "It has weight—a timeless icon like Madonna on a dembow [song]," she says. "Sometimes, it becomes regular because I know her, because I get to talk to her all the time, because I get to call her—she calls me, we get to go out, have dinner. So, it's like: that's my friend. But looking from the outside, this is an all-time icon, one of the last icons from her era. She's iconic [on] a whole other level."

That Madonna used her platform to spotlight Tokischa is important to her; she wants Dominican culture to find its place on the world stage. "The most beautiful thing is just to bring the culture everywhere. Make sure that we're heard, make sure that we're seen, make sure that people know we have art," she says. When Dominican artists blow up, she says, they (understandably) tend to focus on survival, rather than looking at a larger lineage of Dominican culture. "Whenever these new artists come up and get lit in the country, they're like, 'Okay, I'm just gonna go club to club, do shows, and get money.' They're not thinking: 'How can I bring this culture to the world?' So, it's hard."

For Tokischa, her wins are also wins for the Dominican Republic, and, perhaps because of that, she doesn't plan to slow down any time soon. "After this album comes out, I'm ready to work on my next project. I already have an idea of what I want to do. I want to go on tour, I want to drop another album," she says. "I want to just keep doing art, I want to keep growing, I want to keep getting better. I want to keep feeling free-and feeling like myself."