Meet the Singer/Rapper Who Isn’t Petrified of Solitude

M any 20-year-olds depend down till they may be able to flash an ID in trade for a drink on their Twenty first birthday. For the artist Lexa Gates, turning 21 marked the primary day of her sobriety. 

“I simply began feeling like, ‘That’s if truth be told lame as fuck now that it’s criminal,’” the cat-eyed rapper-singer-producer, now 23, tells Rolling Stone. 

Rising up in Queens, she spent numerous her early youth as a high-school dropout, smoking, consuming, and “fucking a host of folks.” However on a Twenty first-birthday commute to Puerto Rico, a spot she lived for a bit little bit of her formative years, she had an epiphany that introduced her substance use to a halt: “I simply discovered that wasn’t doing the rest for me — and all my tune used to be like that, too,” she says. Her ultimate hurrah? A stealthy swipe of a “giant ass bottle of Henny” from the airport. 

Gates began making tune in her teenagers, placing her first releases in every single place SoundCloud. Her aesthetic matched her way of life again then: completely pearled joints held via manicured nails, summary Tumblr artwork and memes, and creatively angled selfies edited with picture filters harking back to the overdue 2010s. On a playlist created six years in the past referred to as “og lexagates,” there are songs about poisonous enthusiasts, “D3VILDICK,” and comfortable reflections that function Gates’ making a song in opposition to easy piano melodies. She began venturing into tune after she dropped out of highschool at 15, because of feeling “very unimportant” within the NYC public college gadget. 

Whilst her friends had been at school, she started recording at house — a spot at all times stuffed with tune as a result of her mother wrote songs and frolicked making a song in cafes. Gates and her sister in brief lived with their father in Puerto Rico; Gates recollects an early formative years reminiscence of her mother saving up cash earned from packing cigarettes within the U.S. territory to transport the circle of relatives again to New York. “My mother roughly gaslit me into considering like we had been smartly off or one thing,” she recalls. She returned to town and grew up in Queens, the place she watched her mother’s explorations with tune sooner than starting a adventure of her personal. “I began taking part in piano as a result of [my mom] were given a piano for making a song categories for herself. However I used to be simply interested in it.” 

Gates launched her debut album, Order of Occasions, in 2020, adopted via extra EPs. In 2022, she dropped Universe Wrapped In Flesh, a mission she describes as “the useless pores and skin of the whole lot from sooner than.” Universe Wrapped In Flesh featured the songs “If I Die, I Die,” “The Individual That I Used to be Earlier than,” and the standout “Rotten to the Core,” the place she bounces between promiscuity and “status out the best way” to reach luck. The album were given pickup from small tune publications in addition to virtual platforms like At the Radar Radio. 

In 2023, with a rising web presence, Gates posted her tune to TikTok and shared a number of tune movies on YouTube, world-building a antique taste to compare the nostalgic and somber essence of her laidback tune, incessantly described as being harking back to artists she considers her influences: Mac Miller, Amy Winehouse, and Tyler, the Author. Now she’s crusing off the luck of her main label debut, Elite Vessel, which got here out in October. At the album, she remains true to her mellow sound however with new self assurance. (SZA just lately spotted and shouted her out in an Instagram tale this summer season.)

“[The album] is solely me conforming to the trade and being this personality of price in my box,” she says, sneaking glances at her publicist and supervisor. “As a result of I’m that lady who’s down and grimy from the fucking basement that didn’t move to college … However that is like, I don’t know, I’m only a child. Like, I’m simply squeaky blank and elite.” 

A part of Gates’ newfound “squeaky blank” vibe comes with solitude, a theme she sings about at the 12-track album. Now not handiest has she been not able to peer her mother and sister a lot with the calls for of her budding occupation, however numerous the album holds the burden of a previous courting. “I’m in a position to throw it out into the arena in order that I will be able to center of attention on who I’m now,” Gates says. 

Earlier than Elite Vessel got here out, Gates promoted the album with some efficiency artwork. She sat in a pitcher field in Union Sq. for 10 hours forward of the discharge, handiest being attentive to the album and gaining eyeballs from curious New Yorkers and social media purveyors on probably the most town’s first jacket-weather days. The gesture used to be praised on-line and collected via a number of blogs and TikTok fan pages, with folks calling the fish-bowl isolation as a “genius” strategy to marketplace an album that revolves round loneliness and solitude. 

With extra enhance and promotion round her tune, Gates says she’s nonetheless studying and adjusting to the alternate in tempo from being an impartial artist. (She’s now signed with Capitol and GoodTalk.) “It’s loopy as a result of with the label now it takes goodbye — I didn’t know,” she says. “However now I roughly really feel like I’ve to make the tune extra undying,” she says. When requested in regards to the tune she’s operating on now that Elite Vessel is completed, she will get excited. “That’s the stuff that’s in reality gonna be life-changing for me on an enormous scale.” 

Earlier than lovers, who most likely discovered her in a nook of the web, pay attention to her most recent lifestyles musings, Gates will spend extra time with Elite on a 12-stop excursion, beginning in Chicago and finishing in NYC. Then, she’ll kick off a Eu leg in 2025. “I haven’t in reality long gone to numerous puts. I believe I went to Washington, D.C. I’m excited to visit Portland, Oregon, as a result of I simply wish to see the lakes, ” she says. “There’s perspectives over there.” 

Launching into traveling has had her serious about her first live performance reviews. The primary display she ever noticed used to be the 1975, the place she vividly recalls frontman Matty Healy’s wine-wielding degree presence. “He used to be, like falling,” she recollects. She says now that his nonchalant vibe is one thing she desires to emulate when she’s appearing. “I roughly check out to try this, as it makes me really feel like ‘Oh, smartly, I don’t care, like, I’m under the influence of alcohol,’ despite the fact that I don’t drink. … He regarded cool.” 

Gates is driving a brand new wave of luck, pushed via way of life adjustments and coffee label chores, like making dancing content material on social media. Nonetheless, Gates is taking part in the opposite first-time reviews her occupation has given her thus far — her first therapeutic massage (“it used to be bizarre”) and consuming branzino and dates for snacks (“I’ve a peculiar nutrition.”) She’s left her vices in the back of, however there’s one thing else on her thoughts in recent times: “I’m in reality into having cash,” she admits. “Yeah, I’m into having cash presently.”