Ice Spice is charmingly indifferent to everything from designer clothes, to living up to industry standards, to the men trying to woo her in the wake of her meteoric rise to fame. The Bronx rapper’s brief but memorable debut album, Y2K!, revels in this disaffect, as well as her knack for catchy, viral-friendly bangers. And it also proves that Spice hasn’t lost the regional specificity that makes her version of drill so authentic yet accessible.
The album’s primary producer, RIOTUSA, infuses the sounds of classic New York rap—shifty menace on “Phat Butt,” triumphant horns on “Popa”—with the hyper-fast pacing of drill and Jersey club music. And in a likely nod to the pan-Caribbean culture of her home borough, there’s even some dancehall flavor courtesy of a Sean Paul sample on “Gimmie a Light.”
The drums on Y2K! are emphatic, with beats that simply knock. The album maintains a whirlwind clip throughout: Individual songs are over before you know it, begging you to let it cycle through again so you can luxuriate in the movement and catch more of the punchlines. The majority of those lines, like “No rocks, no scissors/Just gettin’ that paper,” from “TTYL,” are sold on pure attitude alone. And the rapper’s rapid delivery ensures that things don’t dawdle.
One could ding the 10-track Y2K! for its lack of new ideas or ambition—the deluxe version of last year’s Like..? EP is a whole minute longer—but Spice’s skills on the mic do indicate some growth. She’s always been a more gifted technician than her meme-queen status would have you believe, but on tracks like “Did It First” and “Plenty Sun,” she never lets the tension slack. The latter even tells an almost coherent narrative about the push and pull with a man whose shortcomings Spice colorfully describes: “Brodie took a fake Perc, now he got tummy runs.”
Spice also treads new ground cadence-wise. On “Bitch I’m Packin’,” she’s more theatrical than ever, adopting a breathy, raspy tonality akin to Playboi Carti’s, while on “BB Belt,” she extends her sibilant sounds on words like “waist” and “face” (“facccccceee”). For an artist as uniform and formalist in her presentation as Spice, these relatively small tweaks feel noteworthy.
Spice proudly keeps her head firmly planted in the gutter—or, perhaps more aptly, the toilet—on Y2K! She’s still obsessed with her self-described “fat ass” and indulges in the scatological on tracks like “Popa” and “Think U the Shit (Fart).” With filthy juvenilia as her endpoint, Spice disregards the expectations of a major-label hip-hop debut. That she doesn’t feel the need to rap about anything of import or take stab at a ballad or pop anthem is a feature, not a bug.
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