ICE SPICE JUST WARMING UP
Rap’s new princess releasing first EP after emerging from drill scene and attracting Drake’s attention last year
On a cold, damp January afternoon, Ice Spice hopped in a black SUV to head to the area in the Bronx borough where she grew up in New York City. On the ride, the rising hip-hop star started playing her latest single, “In Ha Mood,” on repeat, and rapping along with quiet force: “Oh, they mad ’cause I keep making bops/ Oh, she mad ’cause I’m taking her spot/ If I was (expletive), I’d hate me a lot.”
These are the sort of coolly but directly confident verses that have made Ice Spice, 23, one of the most signature voices in New York drill music, as well as an emerging pop-culture touchstone, beloved both for what she says and how she comes off while saying it.
“I’m just naturally super chill and nonchalant about a lot of things,” she said. “I’ve always been that way, since I was a baby.”
She recently released her first EP, “Like..?” which gathers her previous singles with some new songs, all of which feel of a piece. While the sound of the Bronx drill scene she emerged from is often unrelenting and harsh, the style of her EP, she said, is “pop drill” — spacious, up-tempo and a little skittish, with careful use of melody and just the right amount of punch.
Unlike many New York drill rappers, who tend toward the antic, Ice Spice raps with equanimity: calm, controlled and almost reticent, letting each line linger ever so slightly, almost as if to draw you to her before she again pushes you away.
“She makes this thing we call sexy drill,” said Nicole Racine, founder of Talk of the Town, a media company that documents New York drill music. “Her being sexy, being feminine, not the rah-rah drill that we expect.”
During one hectic week in August, Drake expressed admiration for her music — she posted a screenshot of his message — and then flew her along with her manager and producer, Riotusa (who goes by Riot), on a private jet to his annual festival in Toronto, OVO Fest.
A few days after the event, she released “Munch (Feelin’ U),” the song that would become her true breakout, inaugurate a delicious new piece of slang and establish her signature visual identity: golden curls, bold outfits, intense eye contact.
“We slept on that record because that was the only song we had that didn’t have a sample,” said Riot. At the time, the dominant sound of New York drill relied on familiar samples; earlier, they’d released “No Clarity,” based heavily on Zedd’s decadeold trancepop hit “Clarity.”
But the originality of “Munch” turned out to be a blessing — a hit reliant upon an older hit can feel contingent, saying less about the new artist than about the durability of the older one.
“I’m happy the first song that ever really blew up for me like that was an original song, with an original word,” Ice Spice said. “I’m just so proud of that.”
The response, fueled by social media, was instant.
“I remember the week ‘Munch’ came out, I had went to the mall, right?” Ice Spice said. “And a bunch of kids started running up to me like, ‘Yo, are you the “Munch” girl?’ And like, taking pictures of me and recording me.”
In the wake of the success of “Munch,” Ice Spice signed to 10K Projects/Capitol Records, and had her first taste of financial success — “I got 2 milli for using a mic,” she posted online at one point. But riding down the blocks where she grew up, she expressed a little exhaustion.
“People won’t ask you directly, like, ‘Hey, can you buy me a house?’ I mean, they will actually,” she said. But she was even more frustrated about the things she couldn’t yet do. “It’s just weird now being at a certain place and not being able to just help everybody that you want to help.”
Born Isis Gaston to a Black father and a Dominican mother who divorced when she was a toddler, Ice Spice has five younger half siblings. She had written poetry and raps since childhood, and her father routinely encouraged her to freestyle with him. (“We would be walking to school, and he would be trying to get me to rap about my day,” she recalled.) She didn’t begin writing full songs until 2019, inspired by the breakout wave of Brooklyn drill rappers that included Sheff G and Pop Smoke, and didn’t record any of them until 2021, after a video of her doing the #BussItChallenge gained traction, and she had a brief flirtation with extreme virality.
“Once that happened I was like, ‘Oh, if I could do it one time, I’m pretty sure I could do it again,’ ” she said. “That’s when I knew I could be an artist.”
Sensing an opportunity, she rushed to complete her first song: the squelchy, tough-talking, Brooklyn drill-esque “Bully Freestyle.” She began recording more tracks, and documenting the process, eventually releasing promo trailers for each to gin up attention and enthusiasm.
She has seamlessly been absorbed into the meme universe — split portraits of her alongside Tupac,
Martin Luther King Jr. and Princess Diana float around the internet, and her lyrics (“How can I lose if I’m already chose?”) pop up in tweets and captions.
She decided to record “Princess Diana,” from her new EP, after seeing memes flying around the internet last year calling her this generation’s Princess Diana. “Who don’t wanna be a princess?” she said quietly, as if acknowledging
something that she’d already known for a while, and assumed everyone else did, too.
In perhaps the ultimate indication of pop culture absorption, Lil Nas X, the effortless channeler of virality, dressed as her in the “Munch” video for Halloween, sporting a neon tank top and a wild wig.
Racine, of Talk of the Town, said, “She’ll make the sexy drill mainstream, she’s just gonna open more doors.” But drill, the aesthetic that has delivered
Ice Spice’s first dose of fame, may only be a convenient way station.
“She’s a pop star,” Riot said. “People say drill just to box people in.”
Ice Spice agreed that her aspirations stretch beyond that sound.
“For me personally, I think I have passed that,” she said. “I do want to be a mainstream artist. I want diamond records and plaques and Grammys. So I think in order to get that, you do have to surpass just one subgenre.”