Lexa Gates Launches Second Album With Second “Crazy Stunt”

Lexa Gates is a 24-year-old rapper/singer/producer from Queens, NY. Today she's released her sophomore album I Am, the follow-up to 2024's Elite Vessel. The album's title is a play on her birth name/initials Ivanna Alexandra Martinez. “I am everything they said I couldn’t be. I am all of those things. I am what I am,” she said about the album. Nice. How did she celebrate this creative milestone? She walked on a giant, specially-made hamster wheel for 10 hours.

Performance art pieces are not new for the rising artist. For Elite Vessel, she lounged in a giant clear box in New York City's Union Square for 10 hours. She explained that the experience was influenced by a push for TikTok content. And, well, she fucking committed to those TikToks: 10 hours in a diaper with no food or water listening to her album, while passersby could come and listen to it with her via headphones and write her notes. Now she's done a similar thing for I AM, but chose an active approach rather than a stationary one. "New year, new album, new crazy stunt," she promised last month. "It’s something about the cycle with love.”

I AM has a lot of promise. It sounds like classic '90s hip-hop and early 2000s R&B, filled with great soul samples (like this one on "I Don't Even Know") and grippy production. I hear a bit of Lauryn Hill, Alicia Keys, early Princess Nokia, Kali Uchis, and even a little Tyler, The Creator production-wise. But make no mistake, there are no direct comparisons. Gates has distinct voice in her own right.

I AM has lowkey swagger with moments of contemplative vulnerability. On the dreamy "Ight," "Don't know if I'm doing anything right/ If I was really even cut for this life/ Trying to focus on the good and the light/Might stay inside my room all night." While later on "Anointed," she asserts: she sings: "I don't even care, what's the fucking point/ God has a plan I'm anointed." Mostly, she persists through life's fluctuations with magnetic flow.

Check out "The Wheel" performance and I AM below.

I AM is out now via Capitol Records.