Album Review: I Am by Lexa Gates
With songs of assurances that keep cracking under pressure. A Queens rapper spends almost an hour convincing herself she’s okay while the verses keep snitching.
Most artists lie to you. They polish the story, clean up the timeline, make themselves the hero. This one lies to herself, out loud, on record, and then tells you she’s lying in the next bar. That’s the whole trick of I Am. Although the title appears to be a pronouncement of who this artist is, the album plays out like someone repeating affirmations until they begin to stick, and she is proud of herself for catching some mid-sentence slips and starting the whole process over again. “I know who I am, I know who I am not,” she says on “Nothing to Worry About,” and you believe both halves equally.
Lexa Gates grew up in Queens making music nobody asked for, dropped out of school because it made her feel invisible, and built a catalog in her bedroom before any label came calling. She raps, she sings, she produces (from time to time), and she does all of it with the kind of bluntness that makes you uncomfortable at parties. Every song circles back to the same question: who is she when she stops performing long enough to notice? The bravado on this album doesn’t come from security. She tells herself she’s good, she tells us she’s good, and then a line slips through that suggests the whole thing might collapse if she stops talking.
The money talk comes early and often. Planes, beaches, accountants, hundred-thousand-dollar withdrawals, Louis bags, and Louboutins. She’s buying things to bye-bye her void, and she’ll tell you that directly on “Nothing to Worry About.” The hook on that one is all triumph—climbing mountains, drinking fountains, calling accountants—but the verse admits she never writes anymore, she’s just on tour, looking for something to purchase. “Shit ain’t half bad/It’s the whole thing.” That line hits different than any brag on the record. She knows the spending doesn’t fix anything. She keeps spending anyway.
“Estranged” is where the album turns a corner and doesn’t apologize for it. She opens asking if he’ll hit her back, admits she might be a freak, and then the post-chorus arrives: “These bitches thirsting over you make me wan’ kill them all/I’ll throw a party on the roof and make sure all them fall.” The verse gets worse from there. She’s imagining wedding rings, then Ubering to his house to watch him sleep, then “Don’t leave me hanging ‘cause without you, I might hang myself.” The progression is deliberate. She moves from longing to obsession to violence to self-destruction in under three minutes, and she never breaks character to tell you she’s joking. On “Serious,” she picks up the same energy: “I’m finna pull up to your crib and kill your cats/I got a gat right now, I’m on my way.” The hook immediately pivots to “Tell me what you want me to be, oh baby/I need you to know that I’m yours forever.” She makes the threat and the devotion feel like the same impulse. That’s real writing. Whether you want to sit with it is another question.
Attention makes her twitchy. “Change” puts her in a room full of cameras and questions—people asking about her race, what her daddy do, rushing her when she’s trying to eat. “Make me wanna catch a case, let me not get crude/I got a bottle full of mace and a blicky too.” The aggression reads as defense, not posture. She’s not flexing the gun; she’s explaining why she carries one. “Really, I’m just in myself, scared of everyone.” That confession lands harder because she buries it in the middle of the verse instead of building to it.
“Stop Me” takes the paranoia somewhere stranger. She’s on a StairMaster, she’s picking trees off a pear, her hands are sticky, she’s thinking about what to wear—the details pile up randomly and anxiously, the way your brain moves when you can’t settle. “She gets locked when she near me, think faster.” The bars tumble out without transitions. She’s racing through thoughts like she’s trying to outrun them.
The self-harm language on this album is direct enough to make you uncomfortable, and that’s the point. “Dead Wrong” opens with “Trying to find a way not to say that it’s hopeless” and escalates to “I bet you there’s an easy fix, pull the trigger and be done with it.” The hook repeats “Shit’s got me suicidal” four times. On “Rest of My Life,” she drops “I would kill myself if I fucked this all up” in the middle of a verse about working weekends and thanking Allah. No setup, no processing, just the thought arriving and leaving. She feasts crisis the same way she treats brags—flat delivery, keep it moving. That approach makes the lines land harder than melodrama would, but it also risks turning pain into texture. When she says “I got half a mind to jump and call this shit a wrap” on “You Don’t Give a Fuck About Me,” it sits in the same verse as jokes about furniture from Ikea and billionaires taking craps. The tonal whiplash is the whole style. Sometimes it reads as control. Sometimes it reads as somebody who doesn’t know how to stay with a feeling long enough to finish it.
That whiplash runs through everything. “You’re Better Off” goes from “I wanna fuck this whole place up/Take a bat to your shit” to “Kinda wanna kill you/It’s too nice to know you” to “Hell, I wish you could raise my baby, but I’m crazy/Hey, but I’m baby.” She makes a threat, undercuts it, admits she’s unstable, turns the instability into a punchline. The humor isn’t separate from the darkness. They’re the same sentence. On “From,” she’s riding around Brooklyn in a trench coat, calling the borough full of cornballs, then admitting “Life’s good, I don’t feel right/Popping tags on the Louis bags/Is there anything I can’t have/Like I don’t know how to cook.” The flex collapses into something small and embarrassing. She can buy whatever she wants but she can’t feed herself. That’s funnier and sadder than any bar about private jets.
The production stays low, sample-heavy and moody throughout, which helps. Nothing fights for attention. The beats give her room to talk, and she fills the space with run-on thoughts that don’t always unravel. “Anointed” wanders through nosebleeds, loneliness, ten stacks blown, God having a plan, wondering who she’ll leave her money to. “I don’t even care, what’s the fuckin’ point.” She asks herself questions she doesn’t answer. That’s the texture of the whole record when somebody is thinking out loud and not always landing somewhere clean.
The album sags in the middle. “All Work No Play” and “Latency” don’t have enough going on to justify their runtime. The ideas revolve around her being busy, traveling, wanting somebody, and maxing out her cards. After eighteen tracks, you’ve heard some of these thoughts three or four times. The title keeps echoing through all of it. I Am. She says it like she’s trying to finish the sentence and can’t decide what comes next. I am fine. I am lucky. I am lying. I am scared. I am insane. She’s all of them at once, depending on the hour, depending on who’s asking, depending on whether she’s buying something or threatening someone or admitting she can’t be alone. Who is she when nobody’s looking? Who is she when everybody is? Eighteen tracks later, she’s still working on it.
Solid (★★★½☆)
Favorite Track(s): “Estranged,” “Change,” “Dead Wrong”