After Writing Behind the Scenes, Niko Rubio Is Ready For the Spotlight

One summer night this June, the Hollywood Bowl was glowing. Niko Rubio was onstage with Zuri Marley, standing beneath the amphitheater’s familiar sweep of lights, as she and Zuri performed their collaborative single “Ring Ring.” Ziggy Marley was headlining the show with Burning Spear, and the air was thick with the sound of harmonic lineage.

“You don’t understand what this meant to me,” Rubio says, still sounding a little awestruck by the memory.

It was exactly the type of music Rubio had spent years absorbing through headphones long before she knew what to do with it. She cried throughout the show, not entirely sure why at the time, but certain that she would venture into the studio the next morning.

All of it reaffirmed a thought she’d been having a lot: “I’m trying to make pop songs right now for a bunch of other people, but this is what I like. What am I doing, not focused on that?”

Rubio had spent the previous five years writing songs for other singers, collecting collaborators, and accepting sessions. After so much time sharing her songs, she began doing something else completely: keeping the music for herself. All her work has accumulated into late night swim , an experimental album, full of swatches of reggae, Latin, and trip hop, that releases on Oct. 30. Rubio weaves stories about heartbreak, drugs, and the slippery, occasionally hallucinatory process of finding your way back to your own life.

The album’s first single, “tokyo,” opens with a spoken-word passage that Rubio had initially assumed nobody would listen to. However, the track’s hypnotic beat helped turn it into her biggest release yet as it found a massive audience on TikTok. Recently, she followed it with “kitty,” a song that belongs to the album’s darker, more cinematic world, where the erosive forces of desire, self-destruction, and heartbreak blur beneath the suffocating glow of Hollywood. Editor’s picks The 250 Greatest Albums of the 21st Century So Far The 100 Best TV Episodes of All Time The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time 100 Best Movies of the 21st Century

Late night swim explores “a theoretical trip that you go on,” Rubio says, and it revolves around a central character: Kitty. “How I started it was I thought, okay, I’m throwing a party for a boy, and I’m sitting in front of the pool, and I’m looking over the Hollywood lights, and it’s nighttime. It’s very Valley of the Dolls, but it’s more. It’s the Nineties and it’s kind of James Bond-y. I’m watching him while crying, but he’s making out with another girl, and maybe that’s Kitty.”

With her producers, she built the small, sealed-off creative world of late night swim , and the record took shape quickly. The album’s first week produced “dream,” which Rubio still calls one of her favorite songs. Then “tokyo” arrived toward the end of the week. It was a song with a 30-second talking verse that she assumed would never work as a conventional single.

That very assumption proved useful: Because she underestimated how many people would hear her song, she didn’t overthink it. When she posted it on TikTok, it reached 250,000 views. Then another 250,000. Then 300,000.