Cortisa Star is kicking down the doors

Taken from the spring 25 issue of THE FACE. Get your copy here.

It’s 5pm on a bright Sunday in Williamsburg, New York, and I spot Cortisa Star on the street corner as soon as I emerge from the subway station. The 19-year-old’s blonde, blue-tipped bangs are peeking out from under the hood of her lemon-yellow Telfar sweatsuit. Even if the passers by don’t know who Cortisa Star is just yet, they’ll assume she’s somebody.

We walk into Kellogg’s Diner, a charming local classic open 24/​7 for nearly a century and revamped in 2023. As we settle into a champagne-coloured vinyl booth in the back, the Baltimore-based, Delaware-raised rapper and model tells me that, just days earlier, someone leaned into her Uber window and whispered: ​“Cortisa…?”

​“They clocked the wig,” she adds with a half laugh, like that explains everything. A few weeks ago, in Atlanta, a girl mouthed ​“I love you” across a diner not unlike the one we’re sitting in.

Cortisa Star has been blowing up For You Pages since going viral with her 2024 track FUN, a spliced-up, distorted banger on which she raps ​“Hundreds of bands, put that bitch in my panty /​He like my body, he know I’m a tranny” with a flow that could rattle a car window.

A July Cancer who believes in fate, she wrote down everything happening to her now in manifestation journals years ago. In the last six months, she’s dropped her debut EP, E.M.O (Evil Motion Overload), walked for Miu Miu at Paris Fashion Week and signed with Next model management. Charli xcx has shouted her out on X and she’s announced a slot at NYC Pride festival LadyLand, where FKA twigs and Cardi B will headline.

Being a Miu Miu girl is no small feat – and to pull it off without ever setting foot on a runway before? Not even an ounce of nerves.

​“Only for the practice runs,” she says. ​“But on the actual runway, I just thought: ​‘Walk.’ And I did. When I saw the videos after, I felt like I looked so sassy. I’d wear that outfit again, probably,” she adds of the long grey coat with socks up to her knees. ​“In, like, 30 years, sitting in a café, fake-reading.” It was her first time out of the country and, yes, she loved Paris. ​“It was so chic and classy,” she says, practically giddy. ​“The skinny cigarettes, the scarves, the trench coats, the accents.”

Long before the co-signs and contracts, there were signs of Cortisa’s potential. In 2022, when she first started messing around on the music-making-slash-social media platform BandLab, she posted a video calling herself an ​“underground rap princess”, practically speaking it into existence. ​“I told my parents I was dropping out of school, that I wasn’t going to work anymore. I was just going to rap,” she says now.

For months, her music lived in deep corners of the internet. Real Cortisa heads remember Menace Prod.Hella Onyx, a crunchy SoundCloud loosie from April 2023. Come December that year, she teased Get It Down on TikTok, a gritty bass-heavy anthem with bratty one-liners (​“You ain’t nothing to me, really, you ain’t nothing but a noun”). It racked thousands of likes, hundreds of comments and nearly a thousand bookmarks before it even hit streaming. By January 2024, Get It Down had 60,000 plays. Which is when the then-18-year-old thought, ​“Maybe I can really do this.” The following month, she dropped FUN, by which point some of her TikToks were clocking millions of views.

Then, in December 2024, her performance of FUN on the rap YouTube channel 4 Shooters Only went viral. In the video, she’s wearing a leopard-print jacket and rapping into the camera with her girls hyping her up in the background.

​“I woke up to thousands of notifications,” she says. ​“I saw the comments, turned my phone off and went back to sleep.” As much as she was praised, the outpouring also revealed a darker truth – the internet mob wasn’t exactly ready for an underground trans rapper to go mainstream. Cortisa, though, shrugs off the transphobic swipes with the same sly humour that runs through her music.

​“I looked a little crazy in one video, one time, and people won’t let me forget it,” she says. ​“I have to wipe a million people’s memories now,” she says. ​“I’m, like, 100,000 people down.”

Which brings us to E.M.O. (Evil Motion Overload), her genre-blurring debut, released this spring. The serotonin-splattered, drill-pop tantrum of a record veers between haunted trap basements and euphoric soundscapes that feel – in her words – like ​“driving down the highway as fast as you can without getting pulled over”. Where her earlier songs built the Cortisa Star myth, E.M.O. cements it: fast, glitchy and laced with sharp witticisms about trans girlhood, hyper-visibility and turning ridicule into armour.

The sound – blown-out bass, crunchy vocals, joyful maximalism – lands somewhere between rage rap, DIY internet pop and latter-day Chief Keef, whose self-made ascent left a blueprint fully relatable for Cortisa. Like the eccentric Chicago drill pioneer, she built a mythos from her bedroom, turning raw, chaotic thoughts into something magnetic. Where Keef gave nihilism heart, Cortisa spins the confounding reality of being a biracial trans girl in America – at a time when the country’s anti-trans and gender non-conforming ideology is peaking – into something feisty, unsanitised and electrically self-possessed.

Most of her early songs were mixed on a busted Chromebook, so stepping into a real studio in NYC felt like a dream. She worked with a handful of underground producers – MsChickenSandwich, DJH, EliWTF, Kashraww – and recruited fellow internet-forged trans pop provocateur Chase Icon for a guest verse on UP. But collaborating with Umru – best known for his work with Charli xcx and A.G. Cook – was the cherry on top.

​“When he asked what kind of beat I wanted, I told him to give me the craziest one in his folder – the one he was scared to show anyone. That’s my beat,” she says. ​“I’m also always asking: ​‘How high can we turn the bass up without killing the girls?’”

On E.M.O., Cortisa also commits to intensity with her lyrical content. On Evil ASF, she’s in full brat-mode: ​“Rock in all black, bitch, I’m emo as fuck /​But sometimes I be cute, but I’m evil as fuck”, she raps, fusing fierce punchlines with cartoonish energy. She’s an uncompromising breakthrough model-about-town on Paris (​“I ain’t got no grills /​I got braces in my fuckin’’mouth”), claiming that ​“even Prada want me”. Then there’s Dramatic, her personal favourite. It’s a loud, lurching track in which she snarls about money, mayhem and menace over pounding 808s: ​“Bass is bumping, the speakers is lagging /​Hit my bong, ho, I’m bringing the tag in”.

Cortisa Star grew up in Sussex County, Delaware: a stretch of land better known for its poultry farms than any kind of music scene. There’s no real mall, save for ​“shopping outlets, which are kind of great because there’s no sales tax”, she says. (She also thrifts – her greatest find: ​“a pair of JLO low-rise boot-cut jeans.”) In Sussex County, Cortisa worked at a pizza place, a seafood market, two ice cream shops, a hotel and a McDonald’s. ​“That was the weirdest one,” she says. ​“People would literally pass out in the drive-through.” There is supposedly a gay beach nearby, but ​“even that’s only gay in theory”.

Home was a crowded house with her parents and three sisters. She cites them as best friends, who ​“taught me everything I know and made all the mistakes first, so I wouldn’t have to”. When she’s travelling, she FaceTimes them every day. In school, she played the tuba (“I need to get it on a song soon!”) and was in every kind of musical combination: ​“concert band, jazz band and marching band”.

Nonetheless, a childhood in smalltown America wasn’t kind. ​“Anything different was looked down upon. And the kids were especially cruel.” Has she heard from any of them since she blew up?

​“None of my bullies, because how dare you hit me up. But the 15 people who were nice to me send me the sweetest messages, saying they always knew this would happen.”

Like a lot of teens who feel like aliens, Cortisa found herself online. ​“I was truly on every corner of the internet you could imagine,” she says, exploring the recesses of BandLab and SoundCloud and Discord ​“with other trans creatives, divas who rap… But also just playing Dungeons & Dragons,” Cortisa adds with a smile. ​“At some point, [the internet] felt like my actual brain.”

That space – free, anonymous, non-judgemental – was pivotal to her transition, giving her room to experiment within a community. As her videos started going viral, she left Delaware for Baltimore, partly to be closer to the budding scene there, but mostly because it felt like a place where she could be herself offline. ​“Everybody’s an artist in Baltimore, it’s so inspiring. It’s niche, but everyone knows everyone.” There are also the furry raves, and there’s a strong mutual respect between Cortisa and the anthropomorphic community. ​“For the record, furries are high fashion,” she says supportively. ​“Those suits run for thousands.” (A few days after we meet, she tweets: ​“I need a highfashion fursuit asap”.)

Cortisa’s online persona remained a secret even from members of her family. ​“My grandmother didn’t know I was wearing wigs in her house,” she says. But grandma discovered her on social media, where she was using the handle @killedcortisa. ​“When she found my Instagram, she was like: ​‘Who is Cortisa? And why are you killing her?’”

By then, music had unlocked something in Cortisa. ​“The moment I accepted that I was just a little off-putting [to some people], I could finally be myself freely”. And in a music landscape where trans rappers are vanishingly rare, ​“off-putting” feels less like a flaw than a compass. It’s what led her to build a self so specific, so unmistakably hers, that no one else could claim it. Note the recent TikTok video she captioned: ​“me 2 years ago at 17 realizing all i need to complete my dream life is free will and to stop caring about others perception of me”.

For someone whose face now floats across fan edits and festival posters, Cortisa seems disarmingly unbothered by the feverish attention she commands. Still, now that she’s being watched so closely, I wonder if she feels a need to protect her energy. ​“Very much,” she says evenly, picking at the last of her chicken biscuit. She wipes her hands on a napkin, then turns back to me, all cool composure again. ​“I’m just trying to make sure I go to sleep happy and wake up happier.”

Is she online as much now? ​“Not at all. My screentime’s down drastically. I just post and log off immediately. I don’t even bother checking my DMs anymore.” But does the hate ever get to her? ​“Honestly, sometimes I forget that I’m not just interacting with bots all day,” she says blithely.

​“I can’t take people hating on the internet seriously.” She does, however, have a favourite backhanded compliment. ​“I love when people say ​‘I hate her music, but she’s really pretty.’ That’s why I have two jobs. You can hate one and like the other. We all win.”

On the diner’s vintage-map-inspired placemats, I spot a sketch of the park under the K Bridge, the site of this year’s LadyLand festival. ​“That’s a sign,” she says. ​“I just know I need to serve maximum cunt. ​“I also need to meet twigs to tell her we need to make Transexua. It would tear.”

For sure. She’s been calling this future in for years, so why stop now? ​“Sometimes imposter syndrome is the only thing standing between you and your manifestations,” she reflects. ​“When you finally get in the room, you realise how huge it actually is. Now I want to bring as many dolls as possible into the studio.”

We finish our meal, cross the street and sit in the park across from the restaurant. It’s her happy place when she’s in New York: a spot ​“she could sit for hours”, her alone time the way she centres herself amid the mania. So, what is Cortisa Star looking forward to in her first summer as a bona fide cultural phenom?

​“Everything,” she says, beaming. ​“I’m just excited about whatever rock hits me next.” The sun’s gone gold and a pigeon waddles into our path, looking, as Cortisa puts it, ​“evil as fuck”. I ask what evil means to her. ​“It’s doing exactly what you want. ​’Cause people hate to see that. I’m just doing what I love. If you think I’m evil for that? Then so be it.”

HAIR Sonny Molina at Streeters MAKE-UP Jezz Hill at CLM NAILS Honey at Exposure NY EXECUTIVE PRODUCER Jude Spour at The Production Studios LOCAL EXECUTIVE PRODUCER Tucker Birbilis at Casa Projects PRODUCTION CO-ORDINATOR Nicholas Schloss at Casa Projects PHOTOGRAPHER’S ASSISTANT Ivory Serra HAIR ASSISTANT Dylan Silver PRODUCTION ASSISTANT Danny Hamilton