M
any 20-year-olds count down until they can flash an ID in exchange for a drink on their 21st birthday. For the artist Lexa Gates, turning 21 marked the first day of her sobriety. 

“I just started feeling like, ‘That’s actually lame as fuck now that it’s legal,’” the cat-eyed rapper-singer-producer, now 23, tells Rolling Stone. 

Growing up in Queens, she spent a lot of her early adolescence as a high-school dropout, smoking, drinking, and “fucking a bunch of people.” But on a 21st-birthday trip to Puerto Rico, a place she lived for a little bit of her childhood, she had an epiphany that brought her substance use to a halt: “I just realized that wasn’t doing anything for me — and all my music was like that, too,” she says. Her last hurrah? A stealthy swipe of a “big ass bottle of Henny” from the airport. 

Gates started making music in her teens, putting her first releases all over SoundCloud. Her aesthetic matched her lifestyle back then: perfectly pearled joints held by manicured nails, abstract Tumblr art and memes, and creatively angled selfies edited with photo filters reminiscent of the late 2010s. On a playlist created six years ago called “og lexagates,” there are songs about toxic lovers, “D3VILDICK,” and soft reflections that feature Gates’ singing against simple piano melodies. She started venturing into music after she dropped out of high school at 15, due to feeling “very unimportant” in the NYC public school system. 

While her peers were in class, she began recording at home — a place always filled with music because her mom wrote songs and spent time singing in cafes. Gates and her sister briefly lived with their father in Puerto Rico; Gates recalls an early childhood memory of her mom saving up money earned from packing cigarettes in the U.S. territory to move the family back to New York. “My mom kind of gaslit me into thinking like we were well off or something,” she remembers. She returned to the city and grew up in Queens, where she watched her mom’s explorations with music before beginning a journey of her own. “I started playing piano because [my mom] got a piano for singing classes for herself. But I was just drawn to it.” 

Gates released her debut album, Order of Events, in 2020, followed by more EPs. In 2022, she dropped Universe Wrapped In Flesh, a project she describes as “the dead skin of everything from before.” Universe Wrapped In Flesh featured the songs “If I Die, I Die,” “The Person That I Was Before,” and the standout “Rotten to the Core,” where she bounces between promiscuity and “standing out the way” to achieve success. The album got pickup from small music publications as well as digital platforms like On the Radar Radio. 

In 2023, with a growing internet presence, Gates posted her music to TikTok and shared several music videos on YouTube, world-building a vintage style to match the nostalgic and somber essence of her laidback music, often described as being reminiscent of artists she considers her influences: Mac Miller, Amy Winehouse, and Tyler, the Creator. Now she’s sailing off the success of her major label debut, Elite Vessel, which came out in October. On the album, she stays true to her mellow sound but with new confidence. (SZA recently noticed and shouted her out in an Instagram story this summer.)

“[The album] is just me conforming to the industry and being this character of value in my field,” she says, sneaking glances at her publicist and manager. “Because I am that girl who’s down and dirty from the fucking basement that didn’t go to school … But this is like, I don’t know, I’m just a baby. Like, I’m just squeaky clean and elite.” 

Part of Gates’ newfound “squeaky clean” vibe comes with solitude, a theme she sings about on the 12-track album. Not only has she been unable to see her mom and sister much with the demands of her budding career, but a lot of the album holds the weight of a past relationship. “I’m ready to throw it out into the world so that I can focus on who I am now,” Gates says. 

Before Elite Vessel came out, Gates promoted the album with some performance art. She sat in a glass box in Union Square for 10 hours ahead of the release, only listening to the album and gaining eyeballs from curious New Yorkers and social media purveyors on one of the city’s first jacket-weather days. The gesture was praised online and picked up by several blogs and TikTok fan pages, with people calling the fish-bowl isolation as a “genius” way to market an album that revolves around loneliness and solitude. 

With more support and promotion around her music, Gates says she’s still learning and adjusting to the change in pace from being an independent artist. (She’s now signed with Capitol and GoodTalk.) “It’s crazy because with the label now it takes so long — I didn’t know,” she says. “But now I kind of feel like I have to make the music more timeless,” she says. When asked about the music she’s working on now that Elite Vessel is finished, she gets excited. “That’s the stuff that’s really gonna be life-changing for me on a huge scale.” 

Before fans, who likely found her in a corner of the internet, listen to her most up-to-date life musings, Gates will spend more time with Elite on a 12-stop tour, starting in Chicago and ending in NYC. Then, she’ll kick off a European leg in 2025. “I haven’t really gone to a lot of places. I think I went to Washington, D.C. I’m excited to go to Portland, Oregon, because I just want to see the lakes, ” she says. “There’s views over there.” 

Launching into touring has had her thinking about her first concert experiences. The first show she ever saw was the 1975, where she vividly remembers frontman Matty Healy’s wine-wielding stage presence. “He was, like falling,” she recalls. She says now that his nonchalant vibe is something she wants to emulate when she’s performing. “I kind of try to do that, because it makes me feel like ‘Oh, well, I don’t care, like, I’m drunk,’ even though I don’t drink. … He looked cool.” 

Gates is riding a new wave of success, driven by lifestyle changes and occasional label chores, like making dancing content on social media. Still, Gates is enjoying the other first-time experiences her career has given her so far — her first massage (“it was weird”) and eating branzino and dates for snacks (“I have a weird diet.”) She’s left her vices behind, but there’s something else on her mind lately: “I’m really into having money,” she admits. “Yeah, I’m into having money right now.”