What is drill music? From Chicago to London to Brooklyn — the sound that went global

Drill is the most consequential rap subgenre of the last fifteen years. That's not hype — that's a map.

A sound that started on the South Side of Chicago in 2011 and 2012 now has scenes in London, Brooklyn, Dublin, Paris, Accra, and Sydney. It has topped charts on two continents, rewritten the rules of rap production twice, been debated on the floor of state legislatures, and spawned enough sub-branches that "drill" now means at least four different things depending on which city you're standing in.

So let's do this properly. Where drill came from, how it sounds, how it mutated as it traveled, why it keeps ending up in courtrooms, and where it's headed.

Chicago: where the word came from

Before drill was a genre, it was slang. On Chicago's South Side, "drill" meant to fight, to retaliate, to go do the thing. The late Woodlawn rapper Pac Man is credited with putting the word on wax with his 2010 single "It's a Drill." He was killed that June, before the movement he named went anywhere beyond his neighborhood.

The neighborhood took it from there.

By 2011, teenagers across Woodlawn, Englewood, and the surrounding blocks were uploading raw, unpolished videos of themselves rapping over dark, sparse beats. The songs didn't sound like anything on rap radio at the time. No punchlines, no maximalist hooks. Just cold, flat delivery over ominous production — reporting, not performing.

Then came 2012.

Chief Keef was 16 years old and on house arrest at his grandmother's place when he and producer Young Chop cut "I Don't Like," released in March 2012. The song detonated. It charted on the Billboard Hot 100, and within months Kanye West — the biggest artist Chicago had ever produced — remixed it with Pusha T, Big Sean, and Jadakiss. Keef signed a major-label deal with Interscope and closed the year with his debut album Finally Rich, carrying "Love Sosa" and "3Hunna," both Young Chop productions.

Young Chop's beats are the genre's DNA: menacing minor-key melodies, orchestral stabs, punishing 808s, and drums that hit like a door getting kicked in.

Keef wasn't alone. Lil Durk broke out in mid-2012 with "L's Anthem," bringing an Auto-Tuned, melodic edge to the drill template, and his 2013 mixtape Signed to the Streets became one of the era's defining releases. His Only the Family (OTF) collective would matter enormously to drill's second act.

That second act belonged to King Von. Von emerged from O'Block — the stretch of South King Drive that had already produced Keef — years after drill's first wave, signing to Durk's OTF and breaking through in 2019 with "Crazy Story," a vivid piece of street storytelling that made him drill's best narrative writer. His debut album Welcome to O'Block dropped October 30, 2020. One week later, on November 6, 2020, Von was killed in a shooting in Atlanta at 26. Like Pop Smoke's death nine months earlier, it was a devastating loss the culture is still processing.

The sound: what actually makes a beat "drill"

Strip away geography and drill has a recognizable sonic signature:

Dark, minor-key melodies. Drill beats live in minor keys — mournful pianos, detuned bells, horror-score strings. The mood is tension, not celebration.

Sliding 808s. The bass doesn't sit on one note. It glides between pitches, swooping under the track. This became even more exaggerated as the sound evolved overseas.

A half-time feel around 60–70 BPM. Classic Chicago drill is often sequenced in the 120–140 range, but the snare lands so sparsely that the songs feel like they're moving at 60–70 BPM. That dragging, heavy pocket is what makes drill sound like a slow walk toward something bad.

Sparse arrangements. Drill producers leave space. The emptiness is the point — it puts all the weight on the drums, the bass, and the voice.

Flat, conversational delivery. Early drill vocalists rapped like they were stating facts. The lack of theatrics made it hit harder.

That's the Chicago blueprint. Everything that follows is a remix of it.

London: the UK flips the drum pattern

UK drill started where UK rap movements usually start: South London. Around 2012–2014, young rappers in Brixton — most notably 150, from the Angell Town estate, and their rivals 67, from Brixton Hill — began rapping over Chicago-style drill production, swapping South Side slang for London road talk. Veteran Brixton producer Carns Hill helped shape those formative 67 releases.

Then UK producers did something crucial: they stopped copying and started rebuilding.

British beatmakers — with producers like MKThePlug and M1OnTheBeat among those credited with pushing the shift — pulled drill through the filter of grime, road rap, and UK garage. Tempos climbed to around 140–145 BPM. Hi-hats got skippier and more syncopated. Kick patterns turned rhythmically slippery, closer to garage's shuffle than trap's grid. And the sliding 808 became the genre's signature instrument, gliding between notes so aggressively it functioned as a bassline melody.

The result was a drum pattern so distinct that by 2018, "drill" in London meant something sonically different from "drill" in Chicago.

Headie One, out of Tottenham's Broadwater Farm estate and the OFB camp, became the sound's early breakout artist — his 2018 track "Know Better" was an underground smash, produced by a young UK beatmaker named 808Melo. Remember that name.

Then Central Cee took UK drill somewhere no British rapper had been. The West London rapper spent 2021–2022 racking up streams, and in June 2023 released "Sprinter" with Dave — his first UK number one, which sat at the top for ten weeks, the longest-running number-one rap song in UK chart history. "Band4Band" with Lil Baby cracked the Billboard Hot 100 in 2024, and his January 2025 debut album Can't Rush Greatness opened at number one in the UK and top ten on the Billboard 200 — a first for a UK rap album in America.

Drill went to London as an import. It came back as an export.

Brooklyn: the UK-to-New York beat pipeline

Here's the beautiful, strange part of the story: when drill arrived in New York, it didn't come from Chicago. It came from London.

Brooklyn rappers like 22Gz and Sheff G were building a local drill scene in the late 2010s, rapping over UK-style production. But the moment everything changed came in 2019, when a Canarsie rapper named Pop Smoke connected with 808Melo — the same British producer behind Headie One's "Know Better" — after finding his beats on YouTube.

The result was "Welcome to the Party," released in April 2019. Pop Smoke's cavernous baritone over 808Melo's gliding UK bass was an instant New York anthem — the song of the city's summer, later remixed by both Nicki Minaj and Skepta. "Dior" followed, and his Meet the Woo mixtapes made him the face of Brooklyn drill and the most exciting new voice New York rap had produced in years.

On February 19, 2020, less than two weeks after releasing Meet the Woo 2, Pop Smoke was shot and killed in a home invasion in Los Angeles. He was 20 years old. His posthumous debut album, Shoot for the Stars, Aim for the Moon, arrived that July and confirmed what New York already knew: he was on his way to superstardom.

Brooklyn drill kept moving because it had to. Fivio Foreign, who broke out in 2019 with "Big Drip," became the scene's standard-bearer — landing on Kanye West's "Off the Grid" in 2021, then releasing "City of Gods" with Kanye and Alicia Keys in February 2022 ahead of his Kanye-executive-produced debut B.I.B.L.E. The UK-to-NY pipeline stayed open, with British producers supplying beats for the biggest names in American rap.

Chicago invented drill. London re-engineered it. Brooklyn made it pop.

The controversy: drill on trial

No genre since gangsta rap has been policed — literally — like drill.

In the UK, it reached an unprecedented point in January 2019, when Brixton duo Skengdo x AM received nine-month suspended prison sentences for performing their song "Attempted 1.0" in breach of a gang injunction. It was reported as the first time in British history artists were sentenced over performing a song.

New York took a different route: the stage door. In October 2019, the NYPD sent Rolling Loud a letter naming five artists as "public safety concerns," and the festival pulled Pop Smoke, Casanova, 22Gz, Sheff G, and Don Q from its New York lineup. It happened again in 2022, when 22Gz, Sha EK, and Ron Suno were dropped from Rolling Loud New York at the city's request. That same year, Mayor Eric Adams publicly linked drill videos to gun violence and argued social media platforms should remove them — comments he walked back somewhat after meeting with New York rappers.

Then there's the courtroom itself. Prosecutors across the country have used rap lyrics as evidence in criminal cases — treating first-person writing in a genre built on first-person writing as confession. The practice drew national attention in the YSL case in Atlanta, where Young Thug's lyrics were cited in the indictment, and it triggered a real legislative fight.

California moved first: in 2022, Governor Gavin Newsom signed AB 2799, the Decriminalizing Artistic Expression Act, making California the first state to restrict the use of lyrics as evidence unless a judge deems them genuinely relevant. New York's version — the "Rap Music on Trial" bill — passed the State Senate but stalled in the Assembly. A federal version, the RAP (Restoring Artistic Protection) Act, was introduced in Congress by Representatives Hank Johnson and Jamaal Bowman, backed by a music-industry campaign called "Rap Music on Trial: Protect Black Art."

The core question is uncomfortable and unresolved: is drill a description of violence, or an incitement to it? The honest answer is that drill is journalism, memoir, and entertainment at once, made mostly by young Black men from neighborhoods the same governments policing the music have underinvested in for decades. You don't have to romanticize the genre's real-world entanglements to see the double standard — no one subpoenas a country songwriter over a murder ballad.

Sexy drill: the newest branch on the tree

The latest proof that drill refuses to sit still came from the Bronx.

Around 2022–2023, producer-rapper Cash Cobain took Brooklyn drill's rhythmic skeleton — the sliding 808s, the punchy drums — and swapped the menace for flirtation: chopped R&B samples, whispered vocals, hooks built for the club instead of the block. The sound got a name, "sexy drill," and Cobain became its architect. "Fisherrr" with Bay Swag, and its Ice Spice remix, took it national; his 2024 debut album Play Cash Cobain — cover art designed by Drake — cemented it.

Cobain put the mission plainly in an interview with Mixmag: "Instead of rapping about killing each other, it's about having a good time."

It's the most radical mutation yet — drill with the darkness turned inside out. We broke the whole subgenre down in our full explainer: Sexy drill explained.

Where drill goes from here

Fifteen years in, drill in 2026 looks less like a genre and more like infrastructure.

In the UK, drill's production language — the gliding 808s, the syncopated drums — has been absorbed so completely into mainstream British rap that it's often no longer labeled "drill" at all. Central Cee is a global pop star. In New York, sexy drill's club-friendly DNA is bleeding into mainstream R&B and pop production.

Meanwhile the sound keeps colonizing new territory. Irish drill is having a real moment. Scenes across continental Europe and Africa keep growing, folding drill into local languages and rhythms — including hybrids with Afrobeats and electronic music. The pattern that took drill from Chicago to Brixton to Canarsie is now running everywhere at once: local kids hear the template, bend it around their own slang and their own streets, and send it back out changed.

That's the real story of drill. It was never just a sound. It's a method — take the hardest truths of where you're from, put them over drums that make the floor shake, and make the world listen.

Hear the next wave first

Somewhere right now there's an unsigned artist flipping drill into its next form — and they don't need a co-sign to prove it, just listeners willing to pick a winner.

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