Young Miko is breaking the mould

“This is the first Monday in so long that I haven’t been at the gym,” she admits. Instead, she spent the day in bed watching anime. “The first thing I do in the morning is put on Tokyo Ghoul while I make coffee.”

With an exaggerated frown, she tells me she dropped off her beloved dachshund, Naila, at her parents’ house last night. The fudge-coloured pup has become one of the most constant companions in her life, and for the first time in a while Miko spent the night alone. “It’s so difficult to sleep without her.” She’s grown used to Naila snuggling beneath her chin, curling along the length of her neck, her caramel puppy scent infusing Miko’s skin and sheets.

“Before her, I had horrible nightmares,” she says. Miko’s had them all her life, waking able to recount every terrifying, vivid detail, “so much so that my mum said I should start writing horror films.” She’s suffered sleep paralysis, too, waking in the middle of the night to see figures from her dreams standing in the corner of her bedroom. The bad dreams only intensified when fame came along. “I’ve never spoken about this,” she reveals, “but when my career started kicking off, I kept having nightmares about people breaking into my house and chasing me.”

After her 2022 breakout EP Trap Kitty came out, introducing her carefully cool flow over dembow reggaeton rhythms, 808 bass, and syrup-slow trap beats, her career accelerated at breakneck speed. She followed it with her 2024 debut album Att. and 2025’s Do Not Disturb. The latter expanded into 2026’s deluxe edition, Do Not Disturb: Late Checkout, with six new tracks and collabs with artists including Rauw Alejandro and Destin Conrad, propelling her into the Top 10 of the global and US Spotify Top Song Debut charts—it was also the biggest US streaming debut of her career.

Over the last year, she’s become one of the most globally recognised Puerto Rican artists of her generation, and one of the few openly queer women to achieve mainstream success in urbano music. In February, she cameoed in Bad Bunny’s record-breaking Super Bowl LX halftime show. In March, she fronted a major Gap campaign, ‘Sweats like this.’, built around a remix of her massively viral track ‘WASSUP’. As an openly lesbian Latina, this was a first. Then in June, she featured in Nike’s ‘Rip the Script’ campaign alongside stars including Kim Kardashian and football players such as Cristiano Ronaldo.

This year saw her propelled into a different league, and the upcoming tour will be the first time she’ll perform for fans. She’s excited, if understandably nervous. “I’m such a homebody,” she says. “I’ll miss my house and my parents.” Still, she’s longed for the stage just as much. “I’ve been dying to expand the world of the album and be able to travel with it.” She’ll bring Do Not Disturb to places she’s never been before: Paris, Berlin, and beyond.

Young Miko stays grounded on tour because she travels with her OGs. “They’ve been my friends forever,” she says. “So it’s funny how even though I can be in a place like Berlin, which is so far away from Puerto Rico, I’m surrounded by the same people. Home is always with me when I travel.”

At the centre of her team is best friend and manager, Mariana López Crespo, with whom she has travelled since they were both 12. Because before she became Young Miko, María Victoria Ramírez de Arellano Cardona played as a midfielder for Puerto Rico’s women’s national team. She spent up to 10 months a year travelling, living alongside teammates in shared houses, moving collectively from competition to competition. Throughout it all, she looked to Crespo for guidance. “Whenever she’d take a shot, you knew she’d score a goal,” Miko says proudly. “That’s my sister.”

Miko’s touring crew has dynamics in common with her former football team. From playing football, she says, she learned teamwork that she’s “able to use in this new field, in this different game we play now”. It has even shaped the way Miko moves onstage; she treats the stage like a football pitch, ready to strike from every position. “In a game, you have different plays, and you coordinate them, and you practice them, and then you give these moves a name,” she says. “And I’ll be doing that on stage. I’ll be planning out, ‘OK, for this song, I’m going to be moving to this side of the stage, and for this song, I want to do this.’ I literally do my own plays, you know? I always have a foot ahead.”

The first time she aligned her style with what might be deemed a lesbian aesthetic was, she says, one of the most terrifying moments of her life. She was a young teenager, obsessed with US footballer Megan Rapinoe and her short pink quiff. Inspired, she decided to cut off the long blonde curly locks, which reached down to her hips. “Not a single girl in my school had short hair, so I said, ‘Fuck it’.” As soon as she got the chop, she says she felt so at home. “I was like, ‘Oh, I am so gay’.”

The day after cutting her hair, she remembers going to school in a hoodie, “because I didn’t tell anyone about my hair and I was so nervous.” She kept the hood up in class, even though it wasn’t allowed, and her stomach dropped when she saw her teacher looking at her disapprovingly. “I knew she was gonna tell me to take the hood off in the middle of the classroom. I was thinking I’d start crying and pass out, it felt like a movie scene.” She duly lowered it and the class let out a collective gasp. “Everybody’s like, ‘No! Your Goldilocks hair!’” she says. “And then I realized, no, you guys. I don’t care. I feel amazing.”

Within days, girls were begging to touch her short hair. “That made me so nervous. I was such a baby.” Within weeks, Miko had started a trend, with other classmates showing up with hair styled like hers.

It seems Young Miko always attracted fans. “There was this group of girls that were three grades younger than me, and they would go to every one of my soccer games. At the end, they’d ask me for my jersey. Then, when I graduated, I saw two of them cut their hair, too. It was pretty cool.”
With all this adoration directed towards her, Miko has always projected a high level of confidence but, she says, “There are still things I’m insecure about… Actually,” she adds, her eyes drifting upward as she follows the thought, “being in the public eye has helped me with certain insecurities. Like my teeth. I used to not smile at all because I have these small, crooked teeth; I wore braces for the longest time. But now, every time I do shoots, they tell me to smile”. Absentmindedly, she runs her tongue along her teeth.

Back to the tour, she’s thinking about what lies ahead. She has the “intention of creating space to make new music”, blocking out days for studio time, “but whether I’ll actually be able to is a different story”. Most of the time she’s either too tired or too wired. “After shows I’m so full of adrenaline I jump around for two hours and my brain feels like nothing’s real.”

She’s restless in the best sense. With each release, she brings a new genre into the fold. “There’s plenty still left to explore,” she says. One day she wants to pay homage to the rock her dad raised her on, as well as reggae: “I grew up listening to Bob Marley, but I still haven’t done a reggae track.” And her ambitions stretch beyond music. “I want to make movies. I want to mentor artists. I want to continue to write any way I can, whether it’s a song or a script or a cooking recipe... I yearn for growth.” She’s open to rapping and singing in English some day, “or, I don’t know, maybe even Portuguese”.

For all those ambitions, she’s determined not to lose the relatability that got her here. She still manages her own social media because, “the way I talk is so specific, my fans would immediately know if it wasn’t me,” but tries not to spend too much time on Instagram. “When I do, it’s always me who’s responding to fans’ comments.” She replies from a finsta, too, slipping anonymously into the comments and posting selfies and pictures of her dog.
She’s leaving a slice of home behind for now: Naila waiting faithfully, a cure for the nightmares, while Young Miko follows her dreams. ♥

Hair CHRISTIAN RODRIGUEZ
Makeup JONUEL NADER LOPEZ
Set design LOUISE MEKYLLA BACHIR
Photography assistants PROSPER PANHARD and CLÉMENT JURKEW
Styling assistants CARLOTA VIVES GINÉS and ANNA MORELLI
Set design assistant KELLIAN MASSON
Production SOLAB FILMS
Post Production STUDIO RM
Location MUSÉE BOURDELLE

THIS STORY IS TAKEN FROM LOVE A/W 27 ISSUE, AVAILABLE TO ORDER AT KD PRESSE.