Words by Skylar Sanders
Hailing from Queens, rapper and singer Lexa Gates is no stranger to a 10-hour-long performance piece ahead of an album rollout. In 2024, she lounged in an oversized clear box in New York City’s Union Square—equipped with a diaper, headphones, and plenty of blankets on a cozy couch—to promote “Elite Vessel.” Now, in a stunt that feels Kevin Abstract-esque, she’s adding walking in a custom-built mechanical wheel for 10 hours to her growing list of public-facing art installations. The performance, which Gates aptly dubbed “The Wheel” and called “self-torture,” was part listening party, part countdown, with fans listening to her new album, “I AM,” on a loop ahead of the midnight drop on Jan. 16.
The album’s title is a play on Gates’ initials, who, when she isn’t performing under her stage name, calls herself Ivanna Alexandra Martinez. The project includes previously released singles “Nothing To Worry About,” “Estranged,” “Latency,” and “Past It,” along with fourteen fresh tracks. Fan favorites, according to the artist’s Spotify streams, include “It Goes On,” “I Don’t Even Know,” and “Ight.”
Throughout “I AM,” Gates falls into a pattern of lying to herself, openly and on record, declaring her inconsistencies and deceptions immediately afterward, and then getting brutally honest about what it all means. Line after line, following her thought process is nearly impossible—one second, she’s talking about eternal vacations, and the next, she’s debating the best way to leave everything behind. Gates’ bluntness surrounding her mental health struggles permeates the album, most notably on “Dead Wrong,” where she confesses she’s “Trying to find a way not to say that it’s hopeless,” saying “I bet you there’s an easy fix, pull the trigger and be done with it.”
Conversely, the raw and visceral nature of lines like “Are you serious? No text back? / I’m finna pull up to your crib and kill your cats” and “Make me wanna catch a case, let me not get crude / I got a bottle full of mace and a blicky too,” cloak her vulnerability in hostility and threats throughout the narrative arc of the album. This blueprint, although compelling, is a motif throughout the project that feels redundant at times, much like running in circles on a human-sized hamster wheel, getting absolutely nowhere.
The cadence of the album is bouncing and sultry in true Lexa Gates fashion, but she doesn’t stray much from this sound, which feels more like an imitation of 2016’s best at times. There’s still a place for this sound, but one has to wonder how long it will actually hold up. Gates has an undeniable knack for stringing words together that check at least most of the boxes, but she seems to struggle with letting her listeners into a coherent thought process, which we could suppose might be the point. Instead, she gets stuck in self-deprecating loops that always seem to circle back to a particular feeling that it seems even she can’t quite place.
Loudspeaker Collective 