happy hour
In which we spend 60 minutes with your faves, doing what makes them happiest.
If you’re one of the many Billie Eilish fans hornily mesmerized recently by one María Victoria Ramírez de Arellano Cardona — by the way she plays around with her mic, suggestively, like she’s “perriándole” during her part in Tainy’s song “Colmillo”; by the way she vogues while singing “Madre”; by the way she flirts onstage, a swag so superior you don’t need a streak on Duolingo to understand — you’re not alone. As in, Cardona, the 27-year-old rapper better known by her stage name, Young Miko, is watching you watch her. Yes, she’s seen your TikTok. “I’ve died laughing with all the videos I’ve seen. I just saw one that said, ‘God forbid, a white girl catches a vibe’ or when I’m singing a bar from ‘WASSUP’” — a flirty, self-indulgent track about owning her sensuality that features a sample of Lil Wayne’s “Lollipop” — “and the caption is, ‘I have no idea what she’s saying, but yes,’” she tells me, laughing.
“I’ve also seen comments like, ‘Now I want to learn Spanish,’” she continues.
Duolingo, who?
“Yeah, you get it! Forget Duolingo, it’s Baby Miko!
We’ve just sat down for dinner at Kiosko 787, a tiny, bright Puerto Rican restaurant in Gowanus that looks like a bit of Old San Juan found its way on an otherwise gray Brooklyn block. We talk in a mix of Boricua Spanish, our mother tongue, and English. At one point, while she’s telling me about needing to prioritize rest, she says, “My body was pleading for me, por un tubo y siete llaves, to stop.” I interrupt to observe how we’re able to talk in Puerto Rican sayings and slang, that I can understand that when she says “through one pipe and seven keys” she means she was feeling overwhelmed. “I love that I can talk so freely and you’ll understand,” she tells me, adding that she’s spent the past year working on speaking up more and bottling her feelings less. Miko points out the window where the kitchen hands over the orders, noting how it looks like one of the balconies you can find down the cobbled streets in Puerto Rico. “It’s so cute,” she says, “Ellos me la dieron toda.” (They served, in other words.)
It’s early, only 6 p.m., but Miko hasn’t eaten anything all day and she’s starving. “Eating is my passion and my love language,” she tells me. She’s wearing a similar outfit to the ones she’s wearing in those TikToks: a plain white T, showcasing both of her tattoo sleeves, and baggy jeans. Rubbing her hands together, she’s having trouble deciding between the chicken asopao, corned beef with sweet plantains, or fried chuletas. If you’re from the island — Miko is from Añasco about an hour’s drive from my own hometown of Quebradillas — then you know this is not an easy choice to make. The chicken asopao, a staple winter dish, somewhere between a stew and a soup, is tempting given the photo shoot she just did outside in the chilly fall air. But the corned beef and fried chuletas? Those are peak comfort foods. Like a greasy hug for your arteries, these are dishes grandmas around the archipelago have perfected. Nevermind, though, because once she sees that the day’s special is chuleta kan kan with arroz mamposteao and sweet plantains, she lets out a screech. “Okay, vamos pa’ encima” — that’s Boricua for “Okay, let’s go!”
For the rest of us who’ve been following Young Miko since Trap Kitty and att. — her 2022 debut EP and 2024 debut studio album, respectively — the hype is just catching up. Her silky vocals and unapologetically queer Spanglish trap bars have been captivating Mikosexuals, as her fans call themselves, since day one. (Real ones have been blasting “Vendetta” and her first single, “105 Freestyle,” since 2021.) Last year, she headlined her first North American tour and was nominated for a Grammy in the Best Música Urbana album category. She also performed on the main stage of the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, the first Puerto Rican woman to do so. And that’s not evening counting her many high-profile features with the likes of Bad Bunny, Feid, or Jowell & Randy. And now, Miko is dropping her highly anticipated sophomore album, Do Not Disturb, 16 tracks marking her new era.
Miko’s massive first half of her order, the arroz mamposteao, arrives. The sweet plantains, she realizes, are already mixed in with the rice, a happy surprise, as she starts to dig in. This is far from her usual on-tour diet — the night before, she played in Philadelphia and after this will head to Long Island to play her last two shows on Eilish’s Hit Me Hard and Soft tour. She tries to eat a light meal between shows to keep her body and mind grounded, she says, and on the day of a show, some fruits and yogurt. But this a welcome taste of home after a few nonstop weeks with Eilish and promotion of her new album, which included interviews with GQ, The Hollywood Reporter, and iheartRadio, all following her New York Fashion Week debut as the first Puerto Rican fashion ambassador for the Council of Fashion Designers of America earlier this fall, a summer spent playing major music festivals like Governors Ball, and making her Paris Fashion Week debut from the front row at Miu Miu this past winter. Nothing beats her mom’s cooking though, she says. Her favorite is chicken nuggets with rice and beans and sweet plantain — it’s still her go-to birthday meal. The trick is her mother covers the nuggets in crushed saltine crackers. A game changer. Another unspoken rule? She gets the whole plantain for herself. When the waiter stops by our table to ask how Miko wants her side of plantains prepared, she leans in to the recorder, saying, “Brief intermission — I was being asked how I wanted my plantains. Very important. Now we can continue.” She got them al ajillo. As well as her dog and her bed, it’s the flavors that she misses most of all.
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At this point, though, Miko is used to living in hotel rooms more than anywhere else. In fact, that’s what inspired Do Not Disturb. (That, and she always keeps her phone on the setting.) The concept came to her about a year ago, around the time she and her team finished the att. tour. “The span between 2024 and 2025 was a year where I felt the need to slow down a bit. I felt like I wasn’t appreciating anything to the point where I felt my mind clutter, and it started to impact my physical and emotional health. Literally, my body was like, diva down,” she says, slumping down on her seat. “That’s where the concept of ‘Do Not Disturb’ emerged. It became something both literal and symbolic.”
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Alongside her longtime friend and producer, Mauro, Miko threads the hotel motif throughout the album’s 16 tracks. “I love playing around with interludes and transitions and Mauro’s a geek of sound design, so we started brainstorming about all the sounds you hear when you’re staying at the hotel,” she says, still going at her rice, a sigh escaping her mouth — she’s getting full. If you listen closely to Do Not Disturb, you’ll hear the beeps of the elevator buttons, the ringing of a front-desk bell, or a knock on the door from housekeeping. “There’s even one transition where you hear somebody start a shower, and you can hear me singing.”
While the album submerges fans in Miko’s hotel world, it also takes us inside her mind and what she was going through emotionally at the time. You have your fun bass-heavy, trap-dance singles “WASSUP” and “Likey Likey,” hot-girl-appreciation songs, and then there are the more introspective tracks like the afrobeats-infused “Meiomi” about distracting herself with a short-lived fling. She attributes Do Not Disturb’s broodingness to her own internal work. After suffering from panic attacks and crying onstage during her att. tour, she recognized she needed to be more emotionally responsible for herself and her friends. “Now I feel more comfortable than ever to talk about my emotions. So there’s a lot of that in the album, an emotional roller coaster,” she says. “This era is more mature. In the past, I tried to do too much and would end up frustrated. This era is ‘do not disturb’ coded. I’ve applied that in every aspect of my life.”
It’s also, if you ask her, Scorpio coded, down to the date her album was announced (the start of Scorpio season) and its actual drop date (a day before her birthday). “It felt like the perfect time to use my zodiac sign. I’ve always wanted to do something with it. I’ve always wanted to do an album that revolves around the black-and-white palette,” she says. As in, all or nothing? I ask. “Exactly!” she says, snapping her fingers.
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Scorpio season will be over when Miko takes the stage at the Coliseo “el Choli” de Puerto Rico in San Juan to perform tracks from the new album. “Puerto Rico saw me from my first song, the ones that have seen me grow, the ones who met me for the first time. It’s my land. It’s my people. It’s my culture. It’s my slang, my blood, my family,” she says, her voice speeding up faster and faster with every sentence. When the presale for the December 5 show went live, it sold out in minutes prompting a second show on December 6.
In the trailer announcing the show, you see Miko’s trajectory, from a clip of her getting interviewed after her first-ever gig to clips of her performing on bigger and bigger stages, each time. At the end, a voice asks her, “Are you ready for el Choli?” and after a clip of her jittery feet, she says, “¡Listísima!” Translation: “I’m more than ready.”
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“I wanted to summarize what this moment means for me,” she says. “I still can’t believe we’re doing two nights.” Miko remembers the exact moment she manifested this dream. “The first time I told my friend Mariana that I wanted to do music, we were hanging around Hato Rey [a neighborhood in San Juan], near el Choli, and we were talking about how I was going to make music and she was going to manage me. We were dreaming big and we drove past el Choli and I blurted out, ‘Do you imagine playing there one day?’ and she confidently told me, ‘It’s going to happen,’” she says. “Definitely a full-circle moment.”
The chuleta kan kan finally arrives, letter-C shaped and bigger than my head. After three or four stabs at it, I tell her she might want to take that to go. She sighs and agrees. Consider, perhaps, the chuleta as a metaphor for her career, for this moment. The successes of this year have been massive and by the time it’s over, she’ll have taken everything she’s learned on the road with Eilish, everything she’s accomplished this year, and brought it back home — the place her heart, her stomach, her everything constantly craves. “Every fan is welcome. It doesn’t matter if they arrived with Billie or with ‘105 Freestyle.’ I am just happy that the fandom is growing, and everybody has welcomed me with open arms,” she says smiling.
Her eight shows with Eilish allowed her to also learn technical things such as how to move and dance around on a stage at the center of an arena or how if the sound bounces differently, now it won’t catch her by surprise. “Like we say, ‘Te pone a coger calle.’” But no matter the stage, whether the crowd is singing along in Spanish or googly-eyed while pulling up Google Translate, Miko wants the same thing, she says. “That the love for what I do is contagious,” she tells me as she gives herself a brief hug. “When I get onstage, the goal is that you have a good time together.”
