{"id":247574,"date":"2026-01-23T09:02:07","date_gmt":"2026-01-23T09:02:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/247574\/"},"modified":"2026-01-23T09:02:07","modified_gmt":"2026-01-23T09:02:07","slug":"lexa-gates-i-am-album-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/247574\/","title":{"rendered":"Lexa Gates: I Am Album Review"},"content":{"rendered":"

On the eve of the release of her new album, I Am, Lexa Gates<\/a> 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\u2019d 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.<\/p>\n

Gates has said the wheel performance was about \u201cunavoidable responsibility\u201d and being \u201cthe curator of the circumstance I\u2019m faced with.\u201d But the multi-camera setup and entry sign denoting UMG\u2019s copyright over the whole exhibit recalled her description of the glass box project<\/a>: that it was \u201cabout how I\u2019m just, like, a product now,\u201d how she \u201cstarted to feel like a deliverable.\u201d 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\u2019 trademark sharp-elbowed, sample-driven hip-hop soul, stumbles by trying to split the difference. For an album styled as Gates\u2019 personal manifesto (the title draws on her initials), I Am is often impersonal, and largely friction-free. It\u2019s an apt companion to the exhibit that launched it, though perhaps not in the way she intended: monotonous and tedious by design.<\/p>\n

No score yet, be the first to add.<\/p>\n

Early on in her career, Gates incorporated her influences\u2014Amy Winehouse<\/a>, MF DOOM<\/a>, Alicia Keys<\/a>\u2014through 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 \u201cRest of My Life\u201d), Patti Drew (\u201cStop Me\u201d), the Intruders (the doo-wop redux \u201cIt Goes On\u201d), and more. Despite the higher-budget backing, these tracks\u2014many produced with Omar Apollo<\/a> collaborator Billy Lemos\u2014feel thematically royalty-free, offering only slight modifications on the same well-worn themes: keep going, fuck the haters, men aren\u2019t shit. Sure, these concepts don\u2019t exactly have an expiration date. But a little scene-setting beyond rote expressions like, \u201cOh, have to go\/Wish I could stay here forever though\/But you never know\u201d or \u201cWow, what a world\/Now I know some shit I didn\u2019t know before\u201d would go a long way.<\/p>\n

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<\/a> and Doja Cat<\/a>, tailor-made for straight talk. Early I Am highlight \u201cI Don\u2019t Even Know,\u201d a slice of Winehouseian neo-soul with distinct New York swagger, exemplifies this. Within a half-verse, she all but beatboxes the phrase \u201cdirty stripper bitches\u201d and delivers a \u201cyeugh\u201d to rival Pusha T<\/a>\u2014nonplussed vocal gymnastics worthy of a far more elastic beat than an ambling flip of a Sweet Breeze sample MAVI<\/a> got the jump on<\/a> seven years ago. The unyieldingly catchy \u201cYou\u2019re Better Off,\u201d a sort of shitty girlfriend sea shanty, hits the same snags. The message and mood is Fiona Apple<\/a>\u2019s \u201cFast as You Can\u201d for the CTRL<\/a> generation (\u201cI wish you could raise my baby\/But I\u2019m crazy,\u201d Gates shrugs). But even a full-bodied brass section and some formidable multi-part harmonies can\u2019t stop the song from fading into a 18-track lineup of anemic lounge-funk flips with near-uniform tempos.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"On the eve of the release of her new album, I Am, Lexa Gates was quite literally in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":247575,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[4958,156,157,111,139,69,1251],"class_list":{"0":"post-247574","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-albums","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-music","11":"tag-new-zealand","12":"tag-newzealand","13":"tag-nz","14":"tag-web"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/247574","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=247574"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/247574\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/247575"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=247574"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=247574"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=247574"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}