Ice Spice - American rapper.
Ice Spice hasn’t always been famous, but she’s always felt like it. “Just the way people would treat me, even when it came to school or being out in public, I always felt stared at,” she says. “When I was at school, I was really one of the most popular people there, so I always felt like, Okay, I could be famous because I’m so popular.”
At home in New Jersey, where she moved after becoming too recognizable in the Bronx (“I get recognized less here, especially when I’m hiding”), the rapper likes to blast her own songs and keep her own music videos on loop on television screens throughout her house.
Ice Spice, 23, grew up as Isis Gaston. (The moniker Ice Spice came from a finsta account she had at 14.) She began releasing music in 2021 while studying communications and playing volleyball at SUNY Purchase.
Then this past August, she released “Munch (Feelin’ U),” a repetitious rap about unrequited love and, some may say, female empowerment. The song caught the attention of Drake, who played it on his Sirius XM radio station, and soon after made its way to TikTok.
A month later, Gaston signed with Capitol Records. On January 20, she released her debut EP, Like ..? Charged with a breathy staccato, her sound is simultaneously relaxed and upbeat, like ASMR for a club rat.
Her delivery is calm yet firm, capable of gently lulling you to sleep or reviving you for a night out. Her music embraces self-love, romantic apathy, and benevolent, delicious misandry. Gaston’s personal favorite, “Princess Diana,” a two-and-a-half-minute ode to her own greatness — “In the hood I’m like Princess Diana” — is a lyrical thirst trap. (Lines like “Hottest bitch out and they know what I mean” would make a supremely confident Instagram caption.) In person, she carries that same assuredness.
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