Young Miko on Her Coachella 2024 Debut, New Album, and Fangirling Over Jaden Smith While Onstage

Joshua Rivera

Editor’s note: Parts of this interview were translated from Spanish by the reporter.

Young Miko enters our video call from a light-filled patio in southern California. Birds chirp into her computer’s mic as she introduces herself, her signature slick ponytail and full-sleeve tattoos framed by a leafy backdrop. You’d hardly know she just wrapped her first weekend performing on Coachella’s Main Stage — or that she dropped an album days prior.

“There are so many things happening back to back and moving so quickly,” Young Miko tells Teen Vogue. That didn’t stop 26-year-old from preparing for her debut Coachella set like a seasoned pro. “I was doing cardio workouts while singing, tons of stuff I’ve never done. The emotions I felt beforehand were just, trying to center myself and balance the physical and mental aspects, to feel healthy and ready, ready for the attack.”

Before she became the genre-bending musician with suggestive Spanglish lyrics, Miko was María Victoria Ramírez de Arellano Cardon from Añasco, Puerto Rico. She used her job as a tattoo artist to pay for time at recording studios before landing her first viral track, “105 Freestyle,” in 2021. The next year, she dropped Trap Kitty, an EP that led to her first headlining tour, several performances with Bad Bunny, and an invite from Karol G to open her Mañana Será Bonito Tour. (She now features on songs with both artists.) Earlier this month, she released her first full-length album, att.

Through her meteoric rise, Miko has stayed true to María Victoria from Añasco. She’s an out lesbian, and her songs discuss her sexual desires in detail. She performs every set with a rainbow microphone — and Coachella 2024 was no exception. What was she thinking as she took the stage?

“I was just trying not to f*ck up,” she laughs. “I knew the crowd wouldn’t just be my fans, that there would be a whole new crowd of people who didn’t know who I was. I really had to show up with the mentality of, ‘I’m going to have fun.’ It was my first time performing with so many musicians. I was so excited to have a drummer, a pianist, everything.”

Miko delivered an electric Weekend One performance. A sea of festival-goers roared through every track as she bounded across elevated platforms with the confidence of a veteran. “It was a really special moment where I just tried to take everything in,” she says.

Looking into the crowd left her starstruck. “Jaden Smith was just watching my set,” she gushes. “I was fangirling a la máxima potencia. Thank goodness I didn’t realize he was there before I went on, because I would’ve been so nervous.”

Smith wasn’t the only person at the front of Miko’s mind as she performed. Mauro, her longtime producer and friend, accompanied her through the entire set. “He was there before we made music together, and we’ve been like siblings for years,” she says. “We’re going to keep doing all of this together until we’re both viejitos and we don’t want to make more music [laughs].”

The pair also worked closely on att. The album’s name is shorthand for “atentamente,” or “sincerely” in Spanish, and according to Miko, it’s meant to sound “like you’re coming into my room and reading my diary when you listen.” She started working on the project in 2022, one month before Trap Kitty’s release. With time, its finer details shifted.

“I got to experience so many new things, and I had the opportunity to talk about that on this album,” she explains. Songs like “f*ck TMZ” address her latest trials and tribulations, while others rewind to her beginnings. “tres tristes tragos,” for instance, features an outro she recorded before her first viral freestyle. “This album definitely started with one flavor, and in the time since, I grew and evolved, and you can feel that evolution. I think that’s what we wanted people to feel the most.”

The album’s 16 songs run the gamut of humble-brag ballads, melancholy confessionals, and anthems you’ll want to dance to all summer. Midway through our call, Miko flashes her phone screen to the camera to show me a playlist called “Gamechanger,” which she listened to while creating att. It’s as diverse as her own tracklist, featuring artists like Fergie, Juanes, and Lauryn Hill. “I didn’t want [att.] to mimic anything, but I wanted it to sound like you could tell what I grew up listening to,” she says, noting that she was most excited to perform the tracks “tamagotchi” and “tres tristes tragos” at Coachella.

The diary messaging of att. is reinforced by its cover, drawn by artist Tamara Hadeed, which shows a cartoon Miko hanging out in her bedroom. The musician says it inspired her aesthetic choices for this era, including her Coachella visuals.

“Tamy kind of just understood everything I wanted for this cover,” she recalls. “She put my character in that pose, with the beanie and the phone, without me asking. I told her, ‘Girl, that’s literally how I look when I’m sitting in my bed.’ And on my nightstand, you can see the letter that I imagine people reading when they listen to this.”

Once Coachella ends, self-care is next on the agenda for Miko, who reveals that her newfound fame came with a learning curve. “Sometimes it’s hard for me to realize I can’t just stop at Walgreens alone, or go to the beach on a Sunday when it’s crowded,” she says. That’s where appointments with her psychologist come in. “She helps me find positives in all of that, like, instead of going to the beach when it’s super packed, let’s take a little boat out with my friends in a more secluded area. There’s nothing I can’t do, it’s just that I have to find different ways to do it.”

Plus, she mentions, her family will always keep her grounded. “I’m blessed that they’ve seen me through everything,” she says, grinning as she adds: “Nobody calls me ‘Miko.’ They can’t even physically say the word ‘Miko.’ They’ll cringe.”

Young Miko is set to perform again during Coachella Weekend Two, which kicks off on Friday, April 19, 2024.

Originally Appeared on Teen Vogue

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