Ice Spice – ‘Y2K!’ review: the rapper tries new tricks on her highly anticipated debut

26 July, 2024

Ice Spice, photo by Coughs

Next month, it’ll be two years since Ice Spice broke through with her single ‘Munch’, and her already dizzying rise to fame has truly gone loco. Everybody wants her on their tracks – whether they’re Taylor Swift, Katy Perry or, reportedly, Kanye West. Everything the 24-year-old New Yorker does seems to start discourse, from lyrics to album artwork to the marketing of her music (like latest single ‘Did It First’, featuring Central Cee). The release of her debut album, then, seems like the perfect time for the Bronx native born Isis Gaston to drown out the noise with a hype-justifying, hater-quieting project.

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On ‘Y2K!’, the star gives it her best shot. Across the record, she sounds menacing and, occasionally, masterful – never better than when she’s casually doling out disses to those who’ve wronged her or she just feels need cutting down. “And no, I don’t got any opps / Why would I beef with a flop?” she asks on ‘Gimmie A Light’. ‘Think U The Shit (Fart)’ finds her addressing a rival with the derisive burn: “Think you the shit? / Bitch, you not even the fart.” On ‘Popa’, she gleefully recalls telling a man she “loved him / I was trollin’”, her voice a half-whisper that’s almost intimidating.

You might have to remove yourself from the moral high ground to enjoy many of the album’s shots, though – one of Ice’s favoured subjects here is bragging about stealing other women’s men. Sometimes she gives them playful props, like on the urgent skitter of the Gunna-featuring ‘Bitch I’m Packin’’: “His bitch ride it really good / But I got better knees.” Elsewhere, she’s bitingly cold. “He got a bitch, but he know I don’t tell,” she declares on ‘BB Belt’. “I’m a baddie, so fuck how she felt.”

Her subject matter might be consistent, but across ‘Y2K!’, Ice tries her hand at new things, too. Trap elements weave their way into the hefty drill beats, while she plays with her already-expressive voice to find fresh ways to switch up her delivery. On ‘Bitch I’m Packin’’, she mimics the spaced-out daze of someone with their head in the clouds as she raps: “Bad as fuck, on a magazine / High as fuck, what is happening?” ‘Plenty Sun’, meanwhile, has her dropping her voice low, elevating her composed flow.

For all its strengths, ‘Y2K!’ has its lows. ‘Oh Shhh…’, which features an underwhelming Travis Scott verse, is frustratingly repetitive, and ‘TTYL’ is unmemorable, its sludgy beat lacking the spark it needs to stand out. Ice’s continued characterisation of herself as “Miss Poopie”, as first heard on ‘Deli’ from her debut EP ‘Like..?’, is neither good nor bad, just baffling.

Toilet humour aside, the star’s debut album shows plenty of promise but some filler, too. It’s not a masterpiece that will silence the haters, but it’s not likely to slam the brakes on her rapid rise either. The lightning speed with which Ice Spice has been launched into the glare of the public eye makes it easy to forget that she’s still in the early years of her career. There’s room and time for her to grow yet.