If you caught Bad Bunny performing “PERFuMITO NUEVO” in the Saturday Night Live Season 50 finale, you also witnessed him trading verses with RaiNao, three years after the King of Latin Trap jumpstarted her career with a social-media endorsement of her track “LUV” and an invitation to his Un Verano Sin Ti tour stage weeks later.
And now, the San Juan-raised RaiNao seems destined to follow her countryman to reggaetón superstardom, and she’s repping queer femmes all the while.
On her 2022 EP, ahora A.K.A. NAO, RaiNao sings about romancing both men and women. In “Tentretiene”—or “Entertainment,” which, as RaiNao recounted to Remezcla, is what her mother deemed her same-sex crushes—she describes lustful encounters with another woman. She released the “Tentretiene” music video on Lesbian Visibility Day in 2023.
“For me, making art and making music is speaking my mind, my spirit, y mi alma [and my heart]. I cannot ignore my stories [or] the way I feel,” she told PopSugar that year. “I need to write them the way they need to be written. I can’t pretend that I’ve never loved a woman. For me, it’s a very natural thing.”
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Born Naomi Ramírez, RaiNao grew up in the Santurce neighborhood of San Juan, the daughter of a salsa-backup-singing father and a reggaetón-banning mother. (RaiNao became a fan of the genre anyway. “For me, reggaetón has marked moments in my life,” she explained to PopSugar. “There are many tracks that transport me and represent more than a song—they are a memory.”)
In her youth, RaiNao sang at church—and in the shower—but doubted her vocal abilities enough that she tried out for the prestigious Escuela Libre de Música as a saxophonist instead of a singer, as she told Rolling Stone in 2024. (It was Lisa Simpson who inspired her to pick up the sax.)
But RaiNao veered back to singing after switching her University of Puerto Rico major from biology to theater arts and audiovisual production. “Theater really helped me learn how to utilize my voice,” she said.
In 2020, Rai Nao shared her first YouTube video, a cover of Víctor Manuelle’s “He Tratado.” And in 2021, she shared an original song called “Me Fui,” which got her a record deal at Sonar, which, in turn, led to her 2022 EP.
Pitchfork likened her music to “the fog on a pitch-dark dancefloor—frosted-glass vocals, blunted dembow riddims, and muted snare rolls gently cutting through the haze.”
As for the stage name she selected, RaiNao is an adaptation of her “Nao” nickname—short for Naomi—that serves as a call to action. “¿Pa’ qué esperar? Mejor RaiNao,” she sings on “LUV.” Translation: “Why wait? It’s better RaiNao.”
“Right now” is also the time to make queerness more visible and more accepted in Puerto Rico. “It’s starting to be normalized, thanks to the efforts of artists like [Villano Antillano], [Young Miko], me, and others. We do our part through music. But there’s still a lot of work to do,” RaiNao told Pitchfork in 2023. “I have to tell these stories. As an artist, I speak my mind, so I’m not going to ignore situations that have happened to me in my life because of what others are going to say.”
And in 2024, RaiNao released her debut album, titled Capicú after a winning dominos maneuver. “It’s like a win-win … No matter what you do, you’re winning,” she explained in the Rolling Stone interview, saying she didn’t care how the album performed. “We’re going to win regardless, because the most important thing is the process, and the process has been beautiful.”
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