Two New York musicians filed a lawsuit against drill superstar Ice Spice on Wednesday, alleging her 2023 hit single “In Ha Mood” infringes on the copyright of their song “In That Mood” published a year earlier.
In the 21-page complaint filed in the Eastern District of New York, Brooklyn-bred rapper and songwriter Duval “D.Chamberz” Chamberlain and Bronx-based sound engineer and producer Kenley “Kass the Producer” Carmenate alleged Ice Spice and her producer Riot “copied” the title, hook, chorus, phrasing, and tempo of “In That Mood” without permission or proper credit.
According to the lawsuit obtained by Rolling Stone, the correlations between the two songs “are so strikingly similar that they cannot be purely coincidental.”
“The similarities between ‘In Ha Mood’ and (‘In That Mood’) – including the key phrase used in the chorus and repeated in a substantially similar manner numerous times throughout both songs – are such that it is simply not reasonable to believe that ‘In Ha Mood’ could have been created without having heard (‘In That Mood’) first,” the suit stated.
Chamberlain said he and Carmenate wrote and recorded “In That Mood” at some point before Chamberlain first used it in an Instagram post on Aug. 8, 2021. The song was later released as a single in early 2022 in connection with an advertising campaign that never ran and later in July 2022 as part of Chamberlain’s album “Boom Bap 2 Drill Rap,” the filing claims.
The Brooklyn rapper-songwriter said he performed the song publicly at least three dozen times around New York and in other states including West Virginia, Pennsylvania and Florida.
“Upon information and belief, Ice Spice, Riot, and/or members of their creative teams were present for certain public performances of In That Mood during the relevant time period,” the lawsuit alleged. “Furthermore, Plaintiffs are well-known in the rap and hip-hop community and share a substantial number of undeniable connections with Defendants.”
Attempts to reach a representative for Ice Spice were not immediately successful Wednesday. The new lawsuit is asking for damages to be awarded at trial.
Last year, Ice Spice took home Best New Artist at the 2023 MTV VMA Awards with hits like “Princess Diana” with Nicki Minaj and “Karma” with Taylor Swift. The artist has already begun to tease new music for 2024 with a snippet of what appeared to be an unreleased song earlier this month accompanied by a meme that read: “Think You the Shit, Bitch! You Not Even the Fart.”