Bb Trickz Sees Your Ice Spice Comparisons

The first time Bb trickz heard the Law and Order theme song she knew it was “hard as shit.”

She was on YouTube, searching for “type beats” to freestyle over when she stumbled upon one uploaded by the producer Shah Major. He’d turned the show’s catchy opening riff into a slick New York drill line. “It's not like I was a fan of Law and Order. I've watched it a couple of times in Spanish, though,” she says, shrugging. “I hopped on it and I just freestyled.”

The result was “Missionsuicida,” a drill anthem merging the Law and Order theme’s gritty white-collar swag with Bb trickz’s girlish bars about f*cking up her opps and being too good to wear Zara, all delivered in mumbly but evocative, disaffected Spanish. It was a little goofy but effective. When the music video premiered in April 2022, which paired the song with Gossip Girl-like aesthetics, it hit the viral jackpot on TikTok, Twitter, and Instagram, turning the 23-year-old Spanish rapper into a minor internet sensation. Where did this girl come from with only one official song to her name, people wondered online? “You bout to blow up gang,” one commenter warned Shah Major back on his original type beat video. “The Spanish ice spice jus got on this.”

Seven months later, the Spanish Ice Spice is sitting in the lobby of the NYLON’s NYC office, her petite frame swaddled inside a huge yellow Moncler puffer. She begins sitting primly for our interview but by the halfway mark is draped over the couch, exchanging rapid jokes in Spanish with her manager.

“[They] think my parents are either famous or hella rich,” she says of rumors around her rapid ascent, rolling her eyes. “But honestly, everything's just been hella organic. Everything happened naturally.”

It’s true that in the span of just a few months Bb trickz effectively turned a hobby into what’s beginning to look like a full-fledged career. In June, off the heels of “Missionsuicida,” she filmed her first Genius “Behind the Lyrics” video; in July, she performed live for the first time at Rolling Loud Portugal. In the interim, she’s been jet-setting between Madrid, where she lives now, and New York, meeting producers and recording songs.

This would all be a new world to trickz — except she’s sort of already used to it.

Born Belize Kazi in Barcelona to a music-loving mother and a DJ and producer father, trickz got her first look inside a studio when she was 6 years old. “[My dad] would play a lot of records before bed,” she says. “He schooled me on music. He would just show me what he liked and always go to the studio, and I'd just be sitting there in the corner.”

Initially, trickz was trying to be a singer because “that's just what I connected with first.” But she soon realized it wasn’t her thing; she never listened to “sung” music. What she did listen to was a lot of rap, specifically sample drill: “Cash Cobain, Shawny Binladen, Future, Young Thug,” she says of her favorite rappers.

In September 2022, she tested the waters and rapped for the first time, out loud, over a sample beat a friend made, and it turned out to be “really cool and really funny.” They began recording songs feverishly, him finding beats on YouTube, and her freestyling over them. In two weeks they’d made the material that would end up becoming her first official release of music, Trickstar.

“We're chulas, [and] New York is chula.”

The charm to Bb trickz’s drill is equal parts in its packaging and her delivery. Her songs are stuffed with savvy cultural references — a trademark of sample drill — balancing the cutesy (Charlie Brown) with the serious (a TuPac interpolation). When she raps, she has the tendency to include a sudden exclamation in English. On “Viva España,” in between lyrics about throwing back a molly and getting messy in the club, trickz tosses out the line, like finishing a dish with Maldon salt, “Rich ass hoe con un big booty too!”

These characteristics perhaps fuel the overwhelming wave of commenters dubbing her the “Spanish Ice Spice.” (And it’s not hard to overlook the similarities of their comeups, with Ice Spice also having to break through a layer of online derision, largely from male hip-hop fans.) Ultimately, trickz gets the comparison. “It’s only because I'm a girl and I'm doing drill, I think. Because if you really listen … we're just different,” she says. “If you don't know what I'm saying in Spanish I can understand, because it's a cute girl doing drill.”

But if anything, trickz says she embodies a “chula,” which she defines as a “cool bitch, but it's like G.” “It describes a lot of people we meet or who we are,” she says. “We're chulas, [and] New York is chula.” That spirit of feminine dominance and swagger will persist in her music even as she evolves, she says; her second EP, sadtrickz, released Nov. 29, is already proof, with songs about the ruminations of a sad chula.

“That's how I want to live life,” she says. “It's like having fun and working hard and just being a chula.”

Bb trickz’ ‘sadtrickz’ is out now.