For a few joyful, sweaty months last summer, Welcome to the Party by Brooklyn drill rapper Pop Smoke was the sound of New York. His smoky baritone seemed predestined for greatness, melding perfectly with the chaos compacted into the beat. But in a New York rap scene full of earned self-reverence, not many knew this was a track made by a British producer, 808 Melo.
“Brooklyn and London are the same thing,” Pop told Complex magazine in early February. “We both got our super-posh sides and we got our super-ghetto sides. We eat the same food, drink the same drink, dress the same. If I show you a nigga from London right now, you can’t tell he’s from London.”
It was his last print interview. Two weeks later, Pop Smoke was shot dead in an apparent robbery at his rental property in Los Angeles. He was 20 years old. A posthumous album, Shoot for the Stars, Aim for the Moon, is being released this week, and prominently features the production work of a collective of young London drill producers whose interpretation of a sound born in Chicago bounced back across the Atlantic to catalyse a new scene. “All the kids that are buzzing in New York, the one common thread are these [London] producers,” says Steven Victor, Pop’s manager. “They’re leading a sound and bringing back a whole city.”
These London producers began to form their loose collective in 2017. Melo and Tottenham’s Swirv and Yoz Beatz had individually been posting drill beats online for a few years. They were in their late teens or early 20s, largely self-taught. As a kid, Yoz sat in on live sessions with his father, a veteran drum’n’bass DJ. But this sound wasn’t born of high-end studios and crisp speakers: it was bedrooms and AirPods, YouTube tutorials and hours of late night trial-and-error on FL Studio software.
Their relationship started simply from “respecting each other’s work”, Yoz says, blossoming on social media DMs and then group chats. They’d talk music but also “memes and video games and normal stuff”, and bonded over their love of drill, the hard, maximalist sound that emerged from Chicago in the early 2010s. They started collaborating and invited more young talent, like east London’s AXL Beats and Yamaica (the crew’s sole Dutchman) into their group chats, talking almost daily. “I would call them my brothers,” says Melo. They were internet kids through and through. “Meeting in person?” Swirv laughs. “No.” They wouldn’t even get the bus to hang out.
Eventually, the various strains of Chicago drill the Londoners dabbled in merged into their own novel creation. As Pitchfork critic Alphonse Pierre has charted, originally, the London producers borrowed Chicago drill staples like clanging church bells for their beats. Things got interesting when they married “the grim core of classic Chicago … with the sliding 808s and manipulated vocal samples of UK grime”.
“I never thought it would expand that big,” says Melo, who produced Welcome to the Party and Pop’s mixtape Meet the Woo. “I just thought it would stay in the UK.”
The London-New York connection was born out of YouTube. Brooklyn rappers 22Gz and Sheff G found AXL and Melo instrumentals on the site and used them to record songs seminal to the borough’s early drill scene. After hearing the groggy synths on Sheff G’s Panic Part 3, Pop Smoke – then not yet Brooklyn drill’s marquee name – sought out Melo, who later put Pop and his manager on to his friends. AXL, Yamaica, Swirv and Yoz all went on to produce for Pop, and all but Yoz signed management deals with Victor. Scene stars Fivio Foreign and Smoove’L, who signed to major labels, also utilised the London corps. The producer’s tags rang loud: song after song out of Brooklyn would start with an echoing “AXL, AXL” or a voice cooing “This is a Melo beat.”
The London sound posed a challenge to rappers, says Victor. “It’s aggressive and unique. I don’t wanna say it’s polarising. But it’s not the easiest music to rap on. The more talented artists can figure it out.” Brooklyn drill borrows the paranoia of Chicago: enemies are everywhere; every victory is bloody and pyrrhic. But a true love of life, an irrepressible New York-bred charisma, shines through – Pop Smoke could threaten your life and still make you want to party. Swirv describes Brooklyn drill’s unlikely danceability as sounding “jumpy”.
The London producers had created a sound popularised by rappers they had never met who lived in a country they had never visited. Over the course of 2019 and early 2020, Pop’s team flew them out for recording sessions in New York and Los Angeles. As well as meeting the Americans, it was the first time they had met each other – a surreal experience, says Swirv, though he says they had instant chemistry. One day in a studio in LA, Quavo and Offset of Migos turned up unannounced and rhapsodised over the beats they were hearing; a Swirv-produced Migos track is now scheduled for release later this year. But what the friends mostly remember was Pop, oozing energy into any room. “That went crazy,” Swirv remembers. “Later, when we went back to the hotel, I was like – what just happened?”
But what happens now that their leader has gone? In that last interview, Pop predicted the sound’s longevity: “This is what New York sounds like now. We bridged that gap between London and New York. We at least got a decade with this.” He had been heavily involved in developing a collaborative album between Melo and AXL. (It’ll feature mostly American artists, although AXL says there’s room for UK acts: “Ones who sound exclusively different to the current ones.”) Says Victor: “Pop was like, ‘Yo, these guys helped me create a sound. I’m gonna help them further it however I can.’”
Says Swirv: “Pop made Brooklyn drill music. He made it. We want to keep his legacy.” Everyone agrees that’s the mission now. “It hurts,” Yoz says. “I look at Pop as a friend. It’s up to us to keep going. To keep repping his name. And to move forward with love.” Melo can’t bring himself to talk about Pop.
Victor believes his coterie of producers can still become A-listers without their captain. “In a perfect world, they evolve from this sound while keeping a lot of main elements,” he says. “They’re already working with some of the bigger artists in the world. I do think for the sound to become what it’s supposed to become, they [also] need to develop their own artists.
AXL and Swirv still live at home, but say they’re plotting a move to New York or Los Angeles. After signing a production deal, Melo left his family’s place for his own flat in London. For now, then, the crew is still UK-based, but despite UK drill flourishing, the US remains their focus. What happened with Pop Smoke and the others is too strong to shake off. “It’s just energy,” Yoz says. “Powers. It was meant for us to work together,” adds Melo. “It just magically happened.”
There are reasons to believe it can keep happening. AXL has already produced for Drake (on late-2019’s War); he and Melo made Gatti for Travis Scott and Pop Smoke. “I want the music to take it to a whole other level,” says AXL. “There’s no limit for this drill thing.” Melo, the original transatlantic connector, is more circumspect. “It could go crazy,” he says. “Or maybe other artists wouldn’t really wanna work with us. My hope is that all these Americans will try to work with us for years to come.”
This summer, Pop’s music resonated in New York once again. It was hard to walk through a Black Lives Matter protest in Brooklyn without hearing his growl out of a car stereo, or hearing his lyrics chanted by protesters. As Pitchfork’s Pierre also reported, Pop Smoke’s Dior – produced by Melo – has become “a radical addition to the protest music canon”.
As for what Pop would have wanted, it’s simple, says Victor. “He would want them to make sure that this thing keeps living on forever.”