Niko Rubio Steps Out From Behind the Songs With ‘Late Night Swim’

For five years, Niko Rubio wrote songs for other people. She took the sessions, built the collaborations, handed the material over. Somewhere in that stretch she started doing the opposite: keeping the songs, and letting them accumulate into something that belonged to her.

That accumulation is late night swim, an experimental album out Oct. 30 that moves through reggae, Latin music, and trip hop. Its subject matter runs on heartbreak, drugs, and the sideways process of finding a way back into your own life.

The record has a hinge. In June, Rubio joined Zuri Marley at the Hollywood Bowl to perform their collaborative single “Ring Ring,” on a bill headlined by Ziggy Marley with Burning Spear. She cried through the show, then went into the studio the next morning. The night clarified a question she had been asking herself: why write pop songs for everyone else and not focus on the music she actually listens to.

With her producers, she built a small, sealed-off world for the album, and it came together quickly. The first week produced “dream,” still one of her favorites, and “tokyo” arrived near the end of it. That track opens with a spoken-word passage she assumed nobody would hear, then found a large audience on TikTok. “kitty” followed, darker and more cinematic, tracing desire, self-destruction, and heartbreak under the glare of Hollywood.

Both songs hang on a character named Kitty and a scenario Rubio describes as a theoretical trip: a party for a boy, a pool, the lights below, someone crying while watching him kiss someone else.