Late last summer, not long after she released her viral megahit Munch (Feelin’ U), the New York rapper Ice Spice was scrolling Instagram and was taken aback to see an ad featuring a photo of her taken in her house, hawking the clothes that a stylist had brought over for her to try. “I was so mad – why am I seeing an off-guard photo of me, with a sock in the background?” she says. “That was the first time I was being annoyed about getting famous.”
But even as she recalls the embarrassingly candid shot, she doesn’t sound bothered. This insouciant persona has inspired fervent devotion in young rap fans. It’s less than a year since Ice, born Isis Gaston, released Munch – the title referring to the kind of man who is good for oral sex and not much else – and became an instant icon, with her orange afro and deep vocals. Initially known for her avowedly feminine take on the hypermasculine sub-genre drill – an early single sampled the hook of Zedd and Foxes’ yearning EDM hit Clarity; other songs flip sexist rap tropes on their head – the 23-year-old has become the New York scene’s biggest star since Pop Smoke, the Brooklyn upstart who was murdered at 20 in February 2020.
Ice’s debut EP, Like..?, released in January, is breezy and playful, her velvety growl skating over cartoonish guitar samples and roiling drill beats. Most of its songs have gone viral, or added something new to the internet’s vocabulary: “munch” became everyday parlance after Ice blew up; “How can I lose if I’m already chose?”, a lyric from Bikini Bottom, is a favourite TikTok caption.
While memes and virality were crucial to her initial rise, Ice’s goal is outright pop superstardom. She scored two of 2023’s biggest hits so far with big-ticket collaborations: she appeared on fellow gen Z sensation PinkPantheress’s Boy’s a Liar Pt 2, which hit No 2 in the UK; last month, Taylor Swift tapped her up for a remix of Karma, which debuted at No 2 in the US. “I always felt like I could do anything I tried to do, but especially now it feels like anything is possible,” Ice says. “Being at award shows, being on magazine covers, getting huge features – all those moments made me feel like: ‘Wow, we’re really doing it big.’”
Ice tries not to let the quirks of newfound superstardom get to her. In person, as in her music, she radiates poise and contentment; although she “be having anxiety and stuff like that”, her grace and gratitude give her a sunny, almost new-age vibe. For instance, she quickly accepted that publications don’t let her pick the photos when they do a photoshoot. “Sometimes I be like: ‘I hate that picture,’” she says. “But then, at the same time, the opportunity is so big – why am I even getting mad over something so small?” She smiles, flashing her blinding-white veneers: “It’s not the end of the world – because I be looking fine, like: it’s OK.”
Meeting on a Tuesday afternoon in the plush member’s room of the Twenty-Two hotel in Mayfair, London, Ice is the picture of a newly minted star: she is wearing a long, bright Jean Paul Gaultier dress and Gucci slides and clutching a pink quilted Chanel bag. Her signature iced-out Cuban-link chain – affixed with a cartoon likeness of her head, encrusted in diamonds – sits around her neck. Her shiny orange hair extensions nearly touch the floor as she perches on a red velvet chair; as she talks, she absent-mindedly runs her flared, glittery-pink nails through them.
Although it takes a moment for her to make eye contact through her pink jewel-studded sunglasses, Ice eventually loosens up. She speaks casually, yet seems extremely conscious of what she is saying; early in our conversation, she asks her publicist to quieten the members of her team in an adjoining room so she can concentrate. Her managers sit silently in one corner of the bar, with two more representatives in another and her publicist at the table next to us. While they are artfully pretending not to listen, they laugh when Ice makes a joke and swoop when a topic is broached that they consider off-limits.
Before the interview, I am told there are two no-gos: rap beefs in general; and the 1975 singer Matty Healy, who laughed at offensive, bordering-on-racist jokes about Ice on a podcast in February. (He offered her an apology from the stage in April; she hasn’t responded.) The controversy reached fever pitch when, days before Swift and Ice released their remix, it was revealed that Swift and Healy were dating. Online, many accused Swift of collaborating with Ice to launder her reputation. When Ice’s publicist collects me before the interview, she warns: “Ice is young, she’s very new to all of this and she doesn’t really know how to say ‘I don’t want to answer that’ yet.”
Ice was born on 1 January 2000 to an African American father and a Dominican American mother. Her dad was an underground rapper and her mum worked at a car dealership. Growing up, her parents would play soca, Latin pop and hip-hop; today, her taste ranges from Drake and Doja Cat to Oasis and David Bowie. “I had a white best friend for, like, eight years,” says Ice. “Between that and being at home in the Bronx, all that is just a melting pot.”
Educated at a Catholic secondary school, Ice calls herself a “popular loner. I’m not gonna lie – naturally, I just attract a lot of people. But I always had my two best friends that I would stick to.” Why does she think she attracts people? “The other day, I was trying to figure it out – I think it’s because I have a wide smile.”
As a child, Ice wanted to be an actor or a screenwriter (“that could still happen”), but began a course in communications at Purchase College in New York with the hope of getting into broadcast journalism or podcasting. She thought those careers would provide “a more chill vibe than sitting in a cubicle”, she says. “I wanted to have more of a free job, where you could take a smoke break, listen to music.”
But rap soon took over. Growing up, Ice had loved rappers like Lil’ Kim and Nicki Minaj; while she was no talent-show kid, she and her cousins would often sing and dance for their family. When she was a teenager, she began writing raps in private, inspired by Pop Smoke and others; after meeting the producer RiotUSA at college in 2021, she recorded her first song, Bully, spurred on after a video of her doing the Buss It challenge went viral on TikTok. Riot has produced all her music since. They work well together, she says, because “we friends first … I notice whenever I’m working with somebody, if we’re not vibing, it’s just not gonna happen, no matter how talented they are.”
Ice believes in keeping it in the family. When she started rapping, she would share her demos with her sisters, who would tell her bluntly if she sounded too derivative. “They was clocking my tea – I knew I sounded like somebody else, but I was just like: ‘Let me see if I can get away with it.’ They was like: ‘No, girl, we know you sound like that.’”
Social media was just as unsparing. Bully was well received, but when Ice released more music (she has deleted a lot of old tracks) “everybody started talking shit”, she says. “I was actually nervous to put music out, because people were talking so much shit.” But Ice says she has a deeply competitive spirit and hates to quit. “I started to realise that they were talking shit because the first song was received well – people only love you when nobody else does, really. But then, once other people start to love you, people have to hate to balance it out.”
To those outside the rap underground, Ice’s success seemingly arrived overnight. To Ice, the 16 months between Bully and Munch “felt like it took for ever”. It has instilled a cautiousness in her. She rarely shares her music with anyone before it’s released, for fear of it leaking. She is protective of her style, careful not to lean too heavily on trends or label suggestions, as much as she appreciates the investment in her project.