“She’s a pop star,” Riot said. “People say drill just to box people in.”
Ice Spice agreed that her aspirations stretch beyond that sound. “For me personally, I think I have passed that,” she said. “I do want to be a mainstream artist. I want diamond records and plaques and Grammys. So I think in order to get that, you do have to surpass just one subgenre.”
Back in the car, she scrolled through new music, both from the EP, and a verse she recorded for a remix of PinkPantheress’s “Boy’s a Liar,” which has a similar tempo to her own songs but a completely different texture. It’s her first adventure out into the world beyond drill but unlikely to be her last.
“I’ve tried Detroit beats. I’ve tried trap. I’ve tried hyperpop,” she said. She speaks Spanish, and has been chatting with the Dominican rapper Tokischa about possibly working together.
On her way home from the Bronx, she stopped at a mall in Elizabeth, N.J., so she and Riot could buy True Religion jeans for an upcoming video shoot, which would take its visual cues from the early 2010s, perhaps the last era, pre-drill, in which New York rap truly spurred national conversation. On the way, they dove into a conversation about whether New York, the birthplace of hip-hop, could ever truly fall off.
“I just feel like there’s never been a moment where it was dead,” she said. “You can name a year and I can say an artist from New York that was popping, lit, that year. We was singing them songs in the parties.”
For maybe the first time all day, she betrayed just the slightest bit of agitation: “Like, I would be mad if one day somebody refers to 2022 as when New York fell off when it’s like, ‘Hello, I’m here.’”
