2” were produced by London drill producers.ĭrill was already important in hip-hop history as Chicago’s local speciality. NY drill hits like Pop Smoke’s “Welcome To The Party” and 22Gz “Suburban” and “Suburban, Pt. With artists like Sheff G and Fivio Foreign leading the wave, the cadences and melodies of NYC drill owes much to London’s current rising stars. Drill music’s rise in England has also made London a hotbed for debates about gang violence and its origins, with politicians pointing to drill as the problem while activists and artists are quick to defend drill as only a symptom of the economic oppression and racism responsible for the desperate conditions in London’s ends.įor all the jokes about UK pop culture being stuck in the Victorian era, it is actually the energy and sound of UK drill that has influenced the emergence of drill in New York City. The raw energy surrounding the original drill movement of Chicago has since become the basis for artists from the streets of England to speak their truths with stark honesty, causing a shift away from Grime as the dominant form of UK rap. Even crazier is that drill has stimulated the rise of hip-hop’s profile in Australia, Ireland, and most notably in England.

However, no one could imagine this hyper-real, hyper-violent sound would come to define the traditionalist hip-hop Mecca of New York City in the next decade. The eruption of Chief Keef and Chicago’s drill movement in 2012 was instant rap lore. Chief Keef and Brixton duo Skengdo x AM in the video for 'Pitbulls' (Skengdo x AM/YouTube)

Drill rap music