Ice Spice

"Munch (Feelin' U)" dropped in August 2022 to a small audience. Then Drake played it on his Sirius XM station and the Bronx drill rap scene got its breakout. The track went viral on TikTok, Lil Nas X dressed as her for Halloween, and she signed with 10K Projects before the year ended, with Capitol Records following in early 2023. 2023 was where the ceiling got blown off: three top-five Hot 100 singles in a single year, including a Taylor Swift collab and "Barbie World" with Nicki Minaj. Drill had been a New York sound for years. She made it a pop sound.

Her debut album Y2K! dropped in July 2024 and landed at #18 on the Billboard 200 with 28,000 units. The reviews were polite but pointed: a Metacritic score of 65, with NPR calling it a career "trapped in a loop of vanity exercises." A deluxe version in December moved roughly 4,800 units its first week. The contrast between her cultural footprint and her actual sales is the whole story. She's on tour, in collabs, in tabloids, but the music hasn't kept pace with the hype. The question isn't whether she's famous. It's whether the fame is doing anything.

Before "Munch," she was a biology-turned-communications major at SUNY Purchase, playing on the volleyball team and working shifts at Wendy's and The Gap. Her father, Joseph Gaston, was an underground rapper who, she has said, brought her to studio sessions as a toddler and introduced her to 50 Cent and Wu-Tang. The stage name came from high school: Ice (short for Isis) paired with Spice because it rhymed. She didn't overthink it, which is kind of her whole thing.