The 19-year-old rapper went from viral TikTok success to walking at Paris Fashion Week. Now, she’s released her debut EP, about being “young, lit and turnt” I t’s only taken three years for Cortisa Star to go from making messy beats in her bedroom to teetering on the edge of being music’s next “it” girl. The 19-year-old artist first started making her blown-out, distorted internet rap as an escape from the isolation of rural Delaware, a place where she felt like “the most different person in the room 90 per cent of the time”.
READ MORE: Underscores: the hyperpop satirist refusing to regress Seeking solace in the internet’s limitless realms helped Star construct the person she is today. It wasn’t long before she was mining samples from looperman.com and uncovered a world of female underground rappers like Skypearleddat, whose fuzzy distortion and bratty aggression informed her own delivery.
“Her song ‘SHE AIN FWM!!!’, that really just woke me up,” she tells NME . “I was like ‘wait, I’m a girl, I’m angry, and I can rap: let me do that’.” Hot off her track ‘Fun’ blowing up on TikTok in 2024, Star has since dropped five singles and is determined to bring permanence to this nebulous virality.
Cosigns from Charli XCX , Doechii , Kim Petras and Lil Nas X – with whom she is manifesting a collaboration – have increased her velocity and determination tenfold. “I’m an outcast in this scene,” says Star. “There’s no trans rappers.
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