Ice Spice seized the moment — but maybe not the right one

We nearly reached the Ice Spice singularity the weekend of the Super Bowl. The evening of Feb. 11, just as an ad featuring the Bronx rapper debuted on the biggest night in American television, she popped up in a box at the game itself, side-by-side with the most gargantuan force in pop music, Taylor Swift. This sight came only a week removed from the Grammy Awards, where she’d had her name called four times for nominations, including best new artist. A few days after this major status upgrade, Ice’s excremental lead single, “Think U the S*** (Fart),” made its debut on the Billboard Hot 100. In an alternate universe, you can imagine the track’s teased pre-virality aligning perfectly with her big broadcast premiere and solidifying her star turn. In our world, the song did not become a big hit. In fact, it was received as clumsy and awkward, a move out of line with a personality that previously exuded carefree cool — and the kind of head-scratching misfire that makes you start to rethink some things.

That moment of divergence — search results rising as musical capital begins to dip — feels like a microcosm of the Ice Spice experience in 2024. Though her initial breakthrough can be credited as much to a voice that cut through nonsense as her colorful image, recently it has started to feel like the 24-year-old missed a few rungs on the developmental ladder, her hype pulling ahead of her demonstrated talent. She’s gotten heat before for not having a more polished stage show, and the singles leading up to the July 26 release of her debut album, Y2K!, suggested there hadn’t been much growth in her sound yet either. Her first LP seems to confirm what was feared, that as her visibility continues to surge (she is Rolling Stone’s September cover star), her creativity has stalled, one of the most promising careers in hip-hop suddenly trapped in a loop of vanity exercises with little sense of momentum.

It wasn’t always this way. After Ice met producer RiotUSA while attending SUNY Purchase in 2021, the pair started to etch out an illusive take on sample drill, flipping dance hits from DJs like Zedd and Martin Garrix into phantasmic spirals. Everything quickly came together the next year with “Munch (Feelin’ U),” a bristling bop that reduces a boy toy into a simpering pet. The sass of its opening shot — “You thought I was feeling you?” — lingers as she sidelines a desperate suitor, relegating him to a casual fling. In that song, things are happening on her time. The same sense of authority, of dominance and effortless, persistent influence, powered the agenda on Like..?, the 2023 EP that brought her style into spellbinding focus; you can hear the annoyed pause of that ellipsis just looking at it. She was a self-proclaimed Princess Diana in the hood, the Balenciaga baddie with a bag swarmed by munches on all sides, getting her rivals tight every time she posted. Her guest appearance on PinkPantheress’ “Boy’s a Liar Pt. 2,” which placed her in conversation with another web-born micro-celebrity on the verge of a break, only seemed to reaffirm her trajectory. The spotlight was on her and she knew it, but she was shrugging off all the attention, as if to say: Why even sweat what’s already predestined?

What had felt like an inevitability started to take a turn late last year, when, after the detours of her Taylor Swift collab and her Barbie promo, newer singles found her struggling to get back in her airtight flow. Industry plant chatter started to creep up (to which she responded by calling herself a “marketing genius”) while cover stories rolled in; she seemed to be everywhere, but not necessarily for new music, which stoked fatigue. Seen from the present, it feels clear that Ice Spice’s signature baddie rap has not scaled up with her celebrity. Some might find that endearing — there is still a certain around-the-way charm to her music, even as she performs a blasé superiority (she sets the tone one line into Y2K! opener “Phat Butt”: “Hatin’ b****es be angry, hatin’ b****es, they ain’t me”). But it is fair to ask why her music isn’t doing more at this stage, why we haven’t seen flexing of greater magnitude or an unearthing of the grime beneath those fancy acrylic nails.

Even taking the music on its own terms, there’s a case to be made that it’s doing less than before. Where she once sounded in complete control of her taunting songs and the cat-and-mouse games played within, there isn’t the same sense of ease here. Her world has gotten much bigger in the last year, yet the world of her songs seems to be shrinking. More than that, she sounds a little starved for new moves: The eater anthem “Popa” is essentially “Munch (Feelin’ U)” slightly recalibrated. “BB Belt” feels like the designer knockoff version of the Like..? single “In Ha Mood,” and its story beats are nearly bar for bar — she’s a baddie (obviously), thick with a slim waist, in the party (it feels very nearly like the same one) with her friends (also baddies) being gawked at, but she can’t be bothered because she is rich and viral. It’s a script that plays out in some variation for just over 20 minutes.

Simplicity and repetition are as much drill staples as they are Ice Spice calling cards. Lyrically and sonically, the subgenre is built for bluntness, and the rapper has stressed that she prioritizes digestibility, but Y2K! is almost crudely basic. It isn’t simply that many of the phrases and flows feel copied directly from existing songs (Nicki Minaj is an unignorable point of reference throughout the album), or that repetition obviously, eventually, comes with diminishing returns. Plenty of rappers wear their subject matter thin. What is grating is how static these songs are lyrically; nothing novel happens in them, and even Ice’s performance of the socialite supreme comes to feel lifeless. She may have always been passive, but she wasn’t inactive. She left others to their devices because what they did didn’t matter; now it seems as if nothing really does. The difference between an economical line and a rudimentary one can be heard distinctly when you cross-reference her older wisecracks, which demonstrated a knack for making the straightforward thing so obvious that it came with a snapping well duh irritation: “How can I lose if I’m already chose?” or “Sayin’ you love me, but what do you mean? / Pretty as f*** and he like that I’m mean” or “How you mad I do less, ‘cause you gotta do more?”, the last of those nearly functioning as a summation of her “brevity is the soul of wit” approach. Y2K! could stand to be more purposeful about language, and the most effective way to unleash that silver tongue.

That said, rap is not merely verses on a page to be annotated on Genius. Often it isn’t what you say but how you say it, and Ice Spice possesses one of the most effective and gratifying voices in the game. It is gloriously snarky and casually aggressive. She presses into syllables and pulls them apart like Play-Doh. Too composed to be malicious, too icy to be engaged, her rapping can sometimes transcend its own bounds. She can make rapping itself feel like an afterthought, so trivial to her day-to-day routine that putting in the minimum effort makes a weirdly intuitive sense. By that measure, the album’s many echoes can feel like her putting that apathy ethic into mindful practice. When she evokes a classic Nicki adage on “Plenty Sun,” she leans into this characterization: “I ain’t got no f***ing kids, I got hella sons,” she raps, her tone nonchalant and certain, “and you chillin’ with a star, not just anyone.” The way she bops through the Central Cee duet “Did It First,” cavalier and slightly scornful, helps sell the song’s cheat-off so well that rumors of drama between the two leads started swirling. These moments of star power, so massive they seem to change the orbit of those around her, briefly reaffirm her position — but she still doesn’t even come off as the biggest star on her own album.

Y2K! is really sustained by RiotUSA, who, in spite of the red herring that is the Sean Paul-reimagining “Gimmie a Light,” doesn’t get stuck in the sandbox of early 2000s samples, and instead spends the album building out drill kits into bone-rattling contraptions driving toward the future. His efforts are among those breathing new life into the subgenre, which has been revitalized this year across its many scenes by records like Chief Keef’s Almighty So 2, Headie One’s The Last One and Polo Perks <3 <3 <3, AyooLii and FearDorian’s A Dog’s Chance. The Riot method is to push the sound’s trademarks to its breaking points. The synths on “B**** I’m Packin’ ” wail like air-raid sirens until the beat bottoms out to reveal klaxons strobing in the distance. “Did It First” is like a drill / Jersey club love child, their quaking patterns overlapping. “TTYL” wobbles with the elastic recoil of a spring mattress. Even Ice recognizes: As “Plenty Sun” is gearing up to start with a thumping, frozen-over beat that should make Young Chop proud, she admits, “The beat so hard, I don’t even wanna say nothin’.”

That’s part of the problem, though — it can feel like there isn’t anything intentional being committed to these songs, or that she isn’t truly elevating them. To be clear, it also feels unfair at this point to question her talent or work ethic, and honestly it is refreshing to see an album resist streaming bloat. But anyone looking to Y2K! to legitimize Ice’s claim to the rap princess title will likely be disappointed by its lack of movement. On “BB Belt,” the rapper asks, “If I ain’t the one, why the f*** am I here, hmm?” It’s a compelling question, but seems to confuse notoriety with ability. A better question, one that requires some self-reflection, might be: Am I here because I’m the one? Are my music and fame in harmony? It is something she still hasn’t quite worked out, but it doesn’t feel like the answer is out of reach.