ice spice fucks

efore dinner, I meet Ice Spice at a recording studio in downtown Manhattan to hear Y2K! — an album on which Ice proves, once and for all, that she’s more than a viral sensation. She arrives at the studio with her team, all of whom move with graceful precision. Bags and laptops shuffle around, and soon, RiotUSA, Ice’s longtime producer and friend, starts playing the album. Those initial singles, “Think U the Shit (Fart)” and “Gimme a Light,” are the only songs that resemble anything Ice has released so far. The rest of the record finds Ice exploring new territory. “I think I’m, like, 90 percent I’m going to do whatever I want, and then 10 percent I’ll give you something you want. But at the same time, I just really like making fun records because that’s what I like to hear most of the time,” she says.

Ice recorded much of the album in Miami, where she moved briefly last year before returning to New York. The record is full of moments where she pushes the boundaries of her own sound, experimenting with different styles of delivery. On “Popa,” named for a Dominican slang term in the Bronx for “coochie,” you can hear flashes of Chief Keef, who Ice says has inspired her since she was a kid, when she raps “Told him that I love him/I was trollin’,” deftly extending her syllables for melodic effect. “I definitely wanted to branch out more and try different sounds, and it was also just really natural, too,” she says. “I’d get in the studio and say the first thing that comes to mind. A lot of these beats are still drill beats, but we’re using a lot of trap elements, too, to spice it up.”

“” a Y2K! track featuring the buzzing U.K. rapper , taps into that hypnotic quality Riot is so adept at conjuring. The track, which rides a pulsating quasi-Jersey Club rhythm, complete with a treacly, pitched-up vocal sample, is a perfect distillation of all of the things Ice does well, while managing to expand into more club-ready terrain. The track’s rollout, too, feels uniquely Ice Spice. In videos posted on social media in the weeks leading up to the song’s premiere, Ice and Central Cee were seen shopping together, which almost immediately fueled dating rumors. But Ice says she’s single and her relationship with the British rapper is merely platonic: “We’ve been friends since ‘Munch’ came out, honestly. We’re just twins.”

And women in rap shouldn’t be seen as a monolith. Take , who’s made hits like “Big Energy” — and traded subtle jabs with Ice Spice in their music. Fans speculated that “Think U the Shit” is about Latto; when the Atlanta rapper became the first woman to headline a local radio station’s Birthday Bash summer concert, her friends even got her a poop-shaped cake, a photo of which Latto tweeted with the caption “Think I’m the shit, bitch ?????”

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