Drill is a subgenre of hip-hop that originated in Chicago’s South Side in the early 2010s, defined by dark production, slowed tempos around 70 BPM, and grim lyrics about street life. The term, slang for ‘kill,’ was coined by Dro City rapper Pac Man, who died in 2010 before the sound went global.
Key Facts
- Topic: Origins of drill
- Origin: Chicago South Side, early 2010s
- Traits: Dark production; ~70 BPM; street lyrics
- Term: Slang for ‘kill’
- Coined by: Pac Man (‘It’s a Drill’, 2010)
The Origins of Drill Music: From Chicago’s Southside to a Global Sound
Drill music is the sound of a specific geography experiencing a specific crisis. It emerged from Chicago’s South Side in the early 2010s not as a stylistic experiment but as a documentary form — a genre whose dark, minor-key production and unflinching lyrical content reflected the conditions of neighborhoods that had been systematically abandoned by the institutions that were supposed to serve them. In the decade and a half since, it has mutated into regional forms in London, Brooklyn, and dozens of other cities, been cited in courtrooms as evidence of criminal intent, triggered censorship campaigns by police forces and city governments, and produced some of the most commercially dominant music on the planet. Understanding how it started requires understanding the place that made it necessary.
What Is Drill? The Sound and the Etymology
Drill is a subgenre of hip-hop characterized by dark, minor-key trap production, typically running around 70 beats per minute in its Chicago form — slower and heavier than Atlanta trap. The production is sparse: deep 808 bass, hi-hat patterns, ominous synth lines, and an overall atmosphere of menace. The lyrical content is specific, often addressing gang rivalries by name, documenting street violence in granular detail, and using a vocabulary particular to the Chicago South Side. [1]
The word “drill” carries layered meaning. In Chicago street slang, “drilling” referred to going on a mission — specifically, retaliating against a rival — carrying connotations of determined, repetitive action as well as violence. Some accounts trace it to the grinding action of a drill tool; others to the Chicago lexicon for shooting. The reductive definition of “drill = kill” that circulates widely flattens what is actually a nuanced piece of community-specific language, but the violent connotation is present and was deliberately embraced by the artists who adopted the term. [2]
The Chicago That Built the Sound
Chicago’s South Side neighborhoods — Englewood, Woodlawn, Grand Crossing, Chatham — had been experiencing decades of disinvestment, population loss, and concentrated poverty by the time drill emerged. The post-2008 financial crisis deepened conditions that were already severe, collapsing what remained of the informal economy and concentrating young men in neighborhoods with few institutional resources and active gang rivalries that dated back generations. The specific geographic structure of Chicago’s gang landscape — with factions of the Gangster Disciples, Black P. Stones, Vice Lords, and their associated splinter groups occupying block-level territories — gave drill its hyper-local character. The music was not about violence in the abstract; it was about the corner, the block, the specific crew, the specific beef. [3]
The role of social media — particularly YouTube and WorldStarHipHop — in drill’s emergence cannot be overstated. Before any label or radio station paid attention, Chicago teenagers were uploading videos to YouTube and generating millions of views. The internet bypassed every traditional gatekeeping mechanism: no A&R, no radio promotion, no distributor. A song could go from a basement recording session to a national audience in days. That infrastructure was what allowed drill to explode, and Chief Keef’s YouTube channel was the primary evidence of how powerful it was. [4]
Pac Man and the Name
The term “drill music” is credited to Pac Man, a rapper from the Woodlawn neighborhood known as Dro City, who used it in his 2010 track “It’s a Drill.” [3] Pac Man was shot and killed in June 2010 — before the movement he had named became an international phenomenon. His death was a harbinger of the violence that would both define and devastate the first generation of drill artists.
Young Chop: The Man Who Built the Sound
The history of drill music cannot be told without Young Chop (Tyree Pittman), the Chicago producer who is more responsible for what drill actually sounds like than any rapper who performed over it. He met Chief Keef through Facebook and went on to produce the beats that defined the genre: “Bang,” “I Don’t Like,” “Love Sosa,” “3Hunna,” and hundreds of tracks for Chief Keef, Lil Reese, G Herbo, Lil Durk, and the broader South Side scene. [5] His production template — the dark minor-key synth lines, the sparse trap percussion, the heavy 808 bass that feels like it’s coming through a wall — is what “drill” sounds like. While individual rappers brought the faces and stories, Young Chop built the sonic environment that made those stories feel so immediate and threatening. His beats carried Chief Keef from a South Side teenager with a YouTube channel to a Billboard artist co-signed by Kanye West. [6]
Chief Keef and the Mainstream Breakthrough
Chief Keef (Keith Cozart) was 16 years old, recording from his grandmother’s house in Englewood, when “Bang” — produced by Young Chop — began accumulating millions of views on YouTube. The track’s impact was immediate in Chicago and spread nationally through social media before any industry infrastructure had processed what was happening. “I Don’t Like,” released in 2012, became the genre’s first proper crossover moment: it charted on the Billboard Hot 100, generated tens of millions of streams, and caught the attention of Kanye West, who recorded a remix featuring Pusha T, Big Sean, and Jadakiss that appeared on the Cruel Summer LP. [7]
The Kanye co-sign was culturally significant beyond its commercial impact. West was at the peak of his critical credibility in 2012, fresh off Watch the Throne and in the middle of the run that would produce Yeezus. His explicit embrace of Chief Keef gave drill a legitimacy it had not yet earned from establishment hip-hop, signaling that the South Side of Chicago was producing something that the culture’s most acclaimed artist considered essential. Chief Keef signed to Interscope Records later that year. [4]
Building the Scene: King Louie, G Herbo, Lil Durk, and Lil Bibby
Chicago’s drill scene in the early 2010s was not a one-artist phenomenon. King Louie built momentum with tracks like “What That Mouth Do” and “Too Cool,” and later appeared on Kanye West’s Yeezus (2013) before signing to Epic Records in 2015. [1] G Herbo (then recording as Lil Herb) emerged from the Eastside as one of the scene’s most technically skilled lyricists, bringing a reflective quality to drill’s documentary impulse that distinguished him from artists who leaned primarily into provocation. Lil Durk and Lil Reese built early buzz with collaborative work, and Fredo Santana — Chief Keef’s cousin — extended the Englewood network into a broader constellation of affiliated artists. [2]
Lil Bibby’s 2013 mixtape Free Crack landed him a contract with RCA Records, but his most lasting contribution to the music industry came when he transitioned from artist to executive, founding Grade A Productions and signing Juice WRLD — whose Death Race for Love debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 in 2019. [8] Chief Keef, meanwhile, was dropped by Interscope in 2014 as the label grew uncomfortable with drill’s ongoing association with violence, ending the brief period of direct major-label investment in Chicago drill. [9]
UK Drill: South London, and the War on the Music Itself
By the mid-2010s, South London had developed its own drill variant, fusing the Chicago template with elements of British grime and garage to produce a sound with a distinct character — faster in some forms, with lyrical content mapped to London’s specific borough and postcode rivalries rather than Chicago’s gang geography. Crews from Brixton, Peckham, Tottenham, and other South London neighborhoods built scenes around the sound, with producers like AXL Beats and 808 Melo developing a UK-specific sonic palette. [10]
The British state responded to UK drill with a level of institutional aggression that had no American equivalent. The Metropolitan Police established an enhanced partnership with YouTube in 2018 that resulted in the removal of 319 drill music videos in 2020 alone, based on police requests rather than any court order. [11] Gang Injunctions and Criminal Behaviour Orders were used to prohibit artists from recording, performing, entering specific postcodes, or associating with other artists. In January 2019, South London duo Skengdo x AM became the first artists in British legal history to receive a prison sentence specifically for performing a song — their performance of a drill track at a concert was ruled a violation of their Criminal Behaviour Order. [12] Critics and civil liberties organizations argued that the campaign disproportionately targeted young Black artists and constituted a form of racialised censorship; the Metropolitan Police maintained that specific songs were inciting violence. The debate — drill lyrics as artistic expression vs. drill lyrics as criminal evidence — anticipated by several years the American “Rap on Trial” cases that the PACE Act would eventually try to address.
Brooklyn Drill and Pop Smoke
New York’s drill scene developed primarily in Brooklyn beginning around 2016, driven by artists like 22Gz and Sheff G who collaborated with British producers including AXL Beats, 808 Melo, and Yamaica. The sound they developed was distinct from Chicago drill — faster, with different rhythmic textures reflecting both the British production influence and New York’s own hip-hop tradition. Drake articulated the moment in a 2019 RapRadar interview: “It’s amazing that the New York drill movement is getting so big.” [13]
Bashar “Pop Smoke” Jackson became the face and commercial peak of Brooklyn drill. His 2019 track “Welcome to the Party” and the subsequent “Dior” established him as the genre’s most commercially potent voice and secured him a deal with Victor Victor Worldwide, Steven Victor’s joint venture with Republic Records. [14] On February 19, 2020 — while staying at a rented home in Los Angeles — he was shot and killed during a home invasion robbery. He was 20 years old. The robbers had obtained his address from a photograph Pop Smoke had posted on Instagram the previous day showing a gift bag with the home’s address visible on a label. [15]
The case was solved. In 2024, Corey Walker — identified as the robbery’s mastermind — pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter and home invasion robbery and was sentenced to 29 years in prison. The 15-year-old who fired the fatal shots received a sentence of 50 years to life under California law, though he can only be held until age 25 under juvenile sentencing rules. [16]
Mayor Adams and the Political Backlash
In February 2022, newly elected New York Mayor Eric Adams drew significant backlash when he publicly called for the removal of drill music content from social media platforms, describing the genre as “alarming” and blaming it for contributing to gun violence. [17] Within days, under pressure, he walked back the social media ban proposal and held a summit with drill artists including Fivio Foreign and Maino — framing the gathering as a collaborative approach to addressing violence. [18] The episode was representative of a broader pattern in American politics: elected officials reaching for music as an explanation for violence rather than addressing the structural conditions that produce it, and then retreating when the cultural and free-speech arguments were made clearly enough.
The New Wave, Lil Durk’s Legal Battle, and the Global Spread
The artists who emerged in drill’s wake have continued to expand and mutate the genre. Ice Spice, the Bronx rapper whose 2022 single “Munch (Feelin’ U)” became a TikTok phenomenon, brought a distinctly New York drill sensibility to a crossover audience, following with collaborations with PinkPantheress, Taylor Swift, and Nicki Minaj. [19] West London’s Central Cee, whose joint EP Split Decision with Dave charted internationally, represents the continued commercial viability of UK drill more than a decade after its South London origins. [20]
Lil Durk — who was among drill’s first wave in Chicago’s early 2010s scene — became one of the genre’s most commercially successful long-term artists, but faces a federal murder charge filed in 2026 in a third superseding indictment. His defense has publicly called the indictment “lipstick on a pig,” arguing that prosecutors are building a case on thin evidence; the legal outcome remains pending. [21] His case is the latest in a long line of drill artists whose music has been used as evidence in criminal proceedings — a pattern the PACE Act in Maryland and the federal RAP Act are specifically designed to address.
Globally, drill’s reach extends to Ghana, Nigeria, the Netherlands, Australia, and beyond — each regional variant adapting the genre’s sonic template and confrontational posture to local conditions of poverty, policing, and youth culture. [22] What started in a specific few square miles of Chicago’s South Side has become one of the defining sounds of global hip-hop — precisely because the conditions it documented are not unique to Chicago. They are conditions that young people recognize wherever institutional neglect and concentrated poverty and the violence they generate have been allowed to shape a community’s life.
Sources
[1] Drill Music Guide — MasterClass
[2] Chicago Drill Music Rap Forced Out — Complex
[3] The End of Chiraq (Andrew Barber) — Google Books
[4] Chief Keef and the Rise of Drill Music — University of South Carolina
[5] Young Chop — Wikipedia
[6] Genius: How Young Chop Helped Create Chicago Drill Music — HipHop Canada
[7] “I Don’t Like” (Remix) lyrics — Genius
[8] Juice WRLD — Death Race for Love No. 1 — Billboard
[9] Chief Keef Confirms Being Dropped From Interscope — Billboard
[10] UK Drill — Wikipedia
[11] How YouTube’s Partnership with London’s Police Force Is Censoring UK Drill Music — EFF
[12] The War on Drill — Index on Censorship
[13] Brooklyn Drill: The New Sound of New York — Complex
[14] Pop Smoke — The New York Times
[15] 18-Year-Old Admits to Fatally Shooting Pop Smoke — Rolling Stone
[16] Pop Smoke Killer Sentenced to 29 Years — Rolling Stone
[17] Mayor Eric Adams Calls Out Drill Rap — Rolling Stone
[18] Eric Adams Meets with Rappers Over Drill Music — The Guardian
[19] Ice Spice — AllMusic
[20] Central Cee — AllMusic
[21] Lil Durk Faces New Murder Charge — Miixtape Chiick
[22] Best Drill Songs: Last Five Years — XXL
