With ‘I Am’ there’s no Mistaking Lexa Gates as a Rapper, a Vocalist, and an Unapologetic Version of Herself
Evan Dale | January 24, 2026
Austin Babbit
Lexa Gates is an unapologetic addition to the part of music’s landscape bridging hip-hop and R&B. She’s also brutally straight-forward with her work. It’s not that she’s no-fucks about it – quite to the contrary, she’s emotionally vulnerable and brutally honest on seemingly all her tracks – but there is an unmistakable nonchalant energy defining the way she delivers every word. Deadpan, spoon-fed, and impassive, she may rub some listeners the wrong way, but name a rapper – or an artist, period – who hasn’t. Name a contemporary of the East Coast tradition that doesn’t talk their shit. None worth their salt. Instead, the rapper and soulstress with roots dug deep into Queens – along with her Columbian and Puerto Rican background – has made a signature out of her one-of-a-kind delivery and head-on approach to the relatable, unrepentant subject matter tethering her sound to her listeners’ ears. With sophomore album, I Am, she’s cementing that sound in tandem with confirming her story. There’s no mistaking Lexa Gates anymore.
Following up 2024’s Elite Vessel is no small task. The project brought her expanding notoriety and a lengthy North American tour. But let’s take it back even a little further to 2023 single, Angel. With it, Gates captured the seamless grey area that continues to delineate her aesthetic today. With it, and on nearly every track since, her deep register floats overtop grass-roots beats that feel as though they were either produced from the keyboard in the corner of her bedroom or recorded from a live band. Her production tends towards the understated and raw, yet emotionally evocative and instrumentally timeless, while her delivery effortlessly spans the rapped and the sung. Like osmosis, a listener doesn’t even know it’s happening until their eyes are closed, and they’re swaying side to side to her crooning. It’s her marionette string that holds a listener’s emotions at will. She’s mastered it, and I Am is a full display of the hard-earned balance between her strongest sets of skills.
The album is long – nearly an hour – but it doesn’t play that way. Its immersive, mellow nature and abundance of cuts that could have stood successfully as their own leading singles ensures that while listening, time is relative. Nonetheless, there are moments in the trance that steal the shine. Estranged being the first standout, the lighthearted yet cutthroat caricature of Gates herself as a possessive lover evokes at once the subtle humor of fleeting yet firm young love, and the staying power of her dynamic yet unwavering sound. It’s a love ballad wearing oversized hoops, and Gates is seamlessly wearing a pair of hats – one of a delicate vocalist, and another of a hard-nosed, humorous lyricist
On the rapped-sung scale, Gates has no problem holding the album’s wheel steady when a track tips one way more than the other. With Ight – a bubbly hodgepodge of analogue instrumentation and layers of her own chorus – she manifests an exhibition of vocal growth. She’s always had the ability to weave the sing-songyness into her sound, but here she lets it lead the way, with some rapped bouts woven in as a secondary mechanism. There’s a jazzy quality to the confident imperfections in her voice, and whether Gates’ vocals are guiding a song’s direction or backing up her bars, its growth is a welcomed presence throughout I Am.
In the opposite direction, take a track like Stop Me, where Gates’ foundational ability as a lyricist sets the tone. Seemingly unable to remove her raps from her forward sense of humor, it’s in these moments that she’s at her most light and nimble, effortlessly moving across the beat with that signature nonchalant energy driving I Am forward.
For the impossibly young, multi-hyphenate Lexa Gates, I Am is a moment of raw vulnerability that unfolds like a series of diary entries, cementing her continued rise in the unmistakable sound she’s developed, while unapologetically re-introducing her most vulnerable self to the world.