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.
When I meet Gaston at an Italian spot just off Times Square, a shocking place for two New Yorkers to hang out, she’s tucked into the corner seat of a booth with a plate of seafood pasta piled high in front of her (she would later tell me it tasted “mid”). She has a crop of ginger curls (she says her secret is Miss Jessie’s Pillow Soft Curls Cream) and wears a mesh marbled jumpsuit under a black Prada puffer. Maybe it’s the diamond-studded chain clinging to her neck or the long, manicured French-tip acrylics she uses to scroll on her caseless iPhone, but even if you had no idea who this woman was, you would immediately know she was someone.
Gaston grew up in the Bronx with separated parents. As the eldest sister to five siblings, she was their self-appointed protector. Her favorite part about her new success, she admits, has been the security she’s been able to grant her family. “Their friends and classmates treat them really well because they know they my sister, and I love that for them,” Gaston says. “There’s been a point where they’ve been bullied — we’ve all been bullied at one point — but they don’t gotta deal with that. Like, now they GOATed.”
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