The (Finally) Rich History of Drill Music, Drake’s Plaything for 2020

One of the more punishing recordings of popular American music of the past decade is “Kill Shit,” a hookless deluge of boasts and threats leveled by Chicago rappers Lil Bibby and G Herbo, which came out in 2012. The first thing you might have noticed about the song is that there are only two verses, and each is about 1,000 bars long. The second thing might have been how Bibby and Herbo each sound as if they have fistfuls of tiny, ugly, damned souls packed tightly into their respective voices, though that grimness was sort of betrayed by ill-fitting baseball ringer tees, flooded NikeTalk denim, and backpacks once you got around to watching the video. They were teenagers. Like Chief Keef’s “Love Sosa,” another song tied in living memory to the drill moment of the early 2010s, it’s easy to imagine “Kill Shit” coming over the PA system in the Thunderdome as remains are Zamboni’d off the field of play. Also like “Love Sosa,” Drake tweeted the lyrics. And when talking about popular American music, the only greater gesture of mainstream embrace than Drake tweeting your lyrics is Drake aping your style altogether.

On Christmas Eve, as a part of his manager-cum-business-partner Oliver El-Khatib’s El-Kuumba compilation tape, Drake released “War,” as in the rapper has plenty of disposable income lying around to finance it. It’s of a piece with a certain type of Drake song, in which he reminds whoever’s listening that he really can do anything with his money, such as buying a ski lodge just for the bros to wear their designer puffer jackets in, so getting people whacked isn’t so far-fetched. These loosies (“War” never officially made it to Spotify or Apple Music) tend to coincide with his biannual practice of circling back to whatever new, bubbling trend he sees as the next one, just as his own music is beginning to get too stale or run too laterally to the rest of rap. It’s how he’s managed to stick around so long that he’s now caught the drill wave twice, three generations apart.

If you felt anything at all for “War” whatsoever you should listen to “All Day,” in which Tottenham rapper Headie One paints this inspiring picture: “I can get you O’s for the Lo and I don’t mean the city in Norway / I really took bus to school now I can get a Bustdown Rollie.” The line is a clean distillation of a few of U.K. drill’s key themes, which are Chicago drill’s key themes, which are more or less trap music’s key themes: things bought and sold, lives lost and taken. There’s also plenty of stuff about loyalty, and the bloody, tragic maintenance of neighborhood boundaries. But the sound and feeling of being at the threshold of violence, and also it just being a regular Tuesday, are the qualities that people making drill harp on most. And personally, as a boring person who sits at a desk and cycles through apps for three-quarters of the day, they’re what I find most addicting about it—like pounding the glass at a hockey game or shouting at a baking competition on TV, it’s like visiting insanity for two or three minutes at a time. It’s why a new drill scene is almost always met with moral panic.

Remember, if you will, the first time you watched the “Don’t Like” video. Just Chief Keef and his buddies whiling away the evening in his aunt’s house (Keef was serving house arrest at the time), smoking weed and waving guns around. In a 2017 interview with Vice, DGainz, who directed the video, said he wanted to try something more conceptual. But it didn’t pan out: “[Chief Keef and GBE] don’t really follow rules; it was just run and gun, point, shoot, and see whatever happens.” What you got was an unvarnished view into what life was like somewhere else in the world, however mundane, exhilarating, or terrifying.

U.K. drill came from cross-pollination with Chicago, through YouTube, several odd years ago—like grime music that came before it and like Chicago drill itself, there are a lot of competing stories about where exactly U.K. drill originated. Because the style of video is accessible (limited budget, single camera) and the style of music is mutable (depth-charge-like bass, clipped flows), you’d go gray before getting through all the uploads on Pressplay and finding the root of it. Plus, it’s everywhere: Ireland, Australia, France, Germany. As an observer, it’s truer to the spirit of the genre, I think, to treat drill as a contagion. As something that crash-landed in the present without much of a past to inform its boundless future—which definitely originated in the South Side of Chicago. Music writer David Drake offered a definition in his 2012 Complex cover story about Chief Keef: “‘Drill’ is about the entirety of the culture: the lingo, the dances, the mentality, and the music, much of which originated in the Woodlawn neighborhood of Dro City.”

Travis Scott has also been around long enough to catch three waves of drill music. Except he does so by fusing everything that’s cool at that exact moment and cheating it into a shape that makes sense. He’s taken to a newer, different kind of drill that’s become the sound spilling out of cars and over the radio and desktop speakers all over Brooklyn. “Gatti,” a lean record grafted onto Scott’s new JACKBOYS compilation, features Pop Smoke, a rapper from Canarsie who sounds—as one masterful YouTube comment put it—like he “just had a Popeyes biscuit with no water.” He ruled the summer with “Welcome to the Party,” which carries all the signifiers of Brooklyn drill—the malefic synth tones, the burly bass line, the jitteriness of British grime. I’m more partial to Sleepy Hollow, whose voice is fuller and more burly than it is raspy, which really helps him sell even clumsy lines like “I don’t care who he say he is / I’ll pop a nigga like some acne.”

Sleepy Hollow makes a lot of music with Sheff G, the bard of Brooklyn drill, who first burst into internet consciousness three years ago with “No Suburban,” which brought on the usual charges of directionlessness from Real Hip-Hop’s NYC protectorate. Sucks for them. This is some of the most fun I’ve had listening to music in years. Not even Drake can ruin it.

As it happens, Sheff G credits Bibby and G Herbo for the drill resurgence—it was one of the first songs to ever make him feel “normal,” he said speaking to Alphonse Pierre at Pitchfork. “Like damn, those niggas all the way over there in Chicago were going through the same shit as me. I had to make music like that too.”