On the eve of the release of her new album, I Am, Lexa Gates was quite literally in the middle of her rollout. The 24-year-old Queens rapper spent the 10 hours before her sixth LP dropped walking on a giant self-propelled wheel on view in a gallery in Lower Manhattan, staring ahead and staying quiet as the record played on a loop. The exhibit streamed live on Twitch; inside the gallery, fellow streamers and a smattering of real fans with signs and bouquets watched, too. Multiple attendees told me they’d kept up with Gates, real name Ivanna Alexandra Martinez, since October 2024, when she locked herself in a glass box in Union Square without food or water to promote her major-label debut, Elite Vessel.
Gates has said the wheel performance was about “unavoidable responsibility” and being “the curator of the circumstance I’m faced with.” But the multi-camera setup and entry sign denoting UMG’s copyright over the whole exhibit recalled her description of the glass box project: that it was “about how I’m just, like, a product now,” how she “started to feel like a deliverable.” Debating the line between art and marketing here is beside the point; everyone on a major is a content creator now. But I Am, a higher-gloss version of Gates’ trademark sharp-elbowed, sample-driven hip-hop soul, stumbles by trying to split the difference. For an album styled as Gates’ personal manifesto (the title draws on her initials), I Am is often impersonal, and largely friction-free. It’s an apt companion to the exhibit that launched it, though perhaps not in the way she intended: monotonous and tedious by design.
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Early on in her career, Gates incorporated her influences—Amy Winehouse, MF DOOM, Alicia Keys—through interpolation and cadence, but signing to Capitol opened up lusher, well-aged archives. I Am builds out her soulful timbre and no-nonsense bars, pulling samples from the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band (on “Rest of My Life”), Patti Drew (“Stop Me”), the Intruders (the doo-wop redux “It Goes On”), and more. Despite the higher-budget backing, these tracks—many produced with Omar Apollo collaborator Billy Lemos—feel thematically royalty-free, offering only slight modifications on the same well-worn themes: keep going, fuck the haters, men aren’t shit. Sure, these concepts don’t exactly have an expiration date. But a little scene-setting beyond rote expressions like, “Oh, have to go/Wish I could stay here forever though/But you never know” or “Wow, what a world/Now I know some shit I didn’t know before” would go a long way.
Gates, who began releasing music on SoundCloud in 2019, has a nonchalant, mellifluous flow, a wise-beyond-her-years sound that suits the early-aughts East Coast rap and R&B she often emulates. But her greatest asset is the tone of her voice itself: a low, thick contralto somewhere between Chynna and Doja Cat, tailor-made for straight talk. Early I Am highlight “I Don’t Even Know,” a slice of Winehouseian neo-soul with distinct New York swagger, exemplifies this. Within a half-verse, she all but beatboxes the phrase “dirty stripper bitches” and delivers a “yeugh” to rival Pusha T—nonplussed vocal gymnastics worthy of a far more elastic beat than an ambling flip of a Sweet Breeze sample MAVI got the jump on seven years ago. The unyieldingly catchy “You’re Better Off,” a sort of shitty girlfriend sea shanty, hits the same snags. The message and mood is Fiona Apple’s “Fast as You Can” for the CTRL generation (“I wish you could raise my baby/But I’m crazy,” Gates shrugs). But even a full-bodied brass section and some formidable multi-part harmonies can’t stop the song from fading into a 18-track lineup of anemic lounge-funk flips with near-uniform tempos.
