SPICE WORLD

Ice Spice ignored the haters, commanded our attention, and became a new kind of star. Next up: a great debut album

- JEFF IHAZA

SpongeBob SquarePants is many things to many people: a wildly popular cartoon character, an endlessly renewable source of memes, a sponge who lives in a pineapple under the sea. To Ice Spice, he's an icon of hard work and hustle. We're sitting in a private room at a steakhouse in New York City's Meatpacking District in midJune, a little more than a month before she releases her debut album, Y2K!. “I think I learned a lot from that show," Ice says. "He never wanted a day off, even when Mr. Krabs would tell him, 'Go the fuck home.' He'd be like, 'No, I need to work."" These days, Ice is sort of the same way. The 24-year-old rapper's schedule of late has included prepping for both a European and an American tour, traveling between New York and London for video shoots, recording new songs for the deluxe version of an album that's not even out yet, and, as one does, shooting a scene with Denzel Washington for the upcoming Spike Lee film, High and Low. "I was so nervous because he's a legend," Ice says of Washington. "But he made me feel super comfortable, and it was a smooth shooting day." At dinner, she's wearing an archive Dior slip dress from the early 2000s, featuring a maximalist design gothic patterns doused in reds, pinks, and whites. Earlier in the week, she debuted a series of different hairstyles, including a now-iconic tangerinecolored bob for her "Phat Butt" music video, which she teased a few days prior on Instagram. Tonight, it's a long silky beam of fluorescent orange swimming down the length of her back.

Ice is affable and levelheaded, with an abundance of what young people might call "aura," that preternatural self-assuredness that comes just to the edge of cockiness. It's the kind of armor that seems useful if not essential for a famous person in the era of the algorithm particularly when you're a Black woman, and particularly when you're as good at attracting scrutiny as Ice Spice is.