At this point, there’s a drill variant in nearly every major city in America, but none will put your moral contradictions to the test like the scene in Philadelphia. In recent years, Philly drill rappers have turned the genre’s complicated brutality into theatrical horrorcore heavy on hoops analogies and religious symbolism. The most famous of the bunch is Skrilla, who merged the evil-ass choir-drill beats—popularized by local guys like Ot7Quanny and Lil Buckss—with darkly spiritual (and, yes, memeable) lyricism and exploitative world-building. Deeper under the surface, masked showmen like HappyDranker and Tovi fill their drowned-out diss tracks with mythmaking fit for comic books. The overall scene feels so over the top and stagey that it’s sometimes easy to forget that you are in fact listening to one of the darkest permutations of drill music.
With West Philly’s Reemo, the weight of his words are never an afterthought. In comparison to all of the costume rappers lurking in the city’s shadows, he is the contemplative traditionalist, light on gimmicks. Reemo’s new mixtape, Kyriemo Irving—which includes sick illustrated cover art that features him going for a finger roll at a playground in hell, while an opponent points a gun in the air like Wood Harris at the end of Above the Rim—is full of hungry day-in-the-life raps and meditations on fate from the school of Meek and G Herbo. He’s not a technical buzzsaw like either of those guys, but he has their style of breathless storytelling on lock. “And them funerals when you know you got to get back for the dead, that’s a horrible feeling,” he raps on the jazzy “OverKill,” with the worn-down voice of someone recovering from a bad cold. He’s thinking about the human emotions that a lot of modern drill skips in favor of menace.
I wouldn’t consider Reemo an old soul, though: He embraces the blunted flows and drama integral to Philly drill of the moment. “She look in my eyes, I can’t lie to her/Even my mom know we the ones giving vacations,” he mutters over the faded, 42 Dugg-core drums of “In the Past.” He does run into the same problems a lot of other rappers on the circuit do when stretching their bars into a full-length mixtape: too many mushy Creed montage beats (the biggest offenders are the generic soul samples of “Life Is Good” and “Hoop on the Road”), too much time spent on fucking other dudes’ girlfriends (we need to bring back diaries). That would irk me more if the writing wasn’t otherwise sharp and tonally flexible. He can be funny: He considers messing with a broke girl to be as much of a taboo as eating pork. He spits Marcus Camby and Udonis Haslem punchlines, then tells a story about scaring his latest fling with his PTSD-induced nightmares and cold sweats. “Ray Lewis” is a raw vignette with a King Von level of violent detail, but an unexpected dose of dreaminess and sentimentality.
But I can’t listen to Kyriemo Irving, or any Philly drill mixtape for that matter, without thinking about the tragedy of YBC Dul. Self-nicknamed “Mr. Disrespectful,” Abdul Vicks was a popular West Philly internet troll and shock rapper who used rampant dissing to bring attention to his music. He pushed the trolling about as far as any rapper I can remember, racking up millions of plays, until he was killed in 2024 at age 25. It’s a cautionary tale that looms over not just Philly drill, but every drill offshoot around the globe—a new chapter in the eternal argument about whether drill is a community cancer that inspires violence, or autofiction that increasingly reflects the realities of a genre overrun by bloodthirsty fan armies and teens and twentysomethings desperate to go viral.
Bleak. I understand if you choose not to engage, or if you believe I’m wrong for still covering the music, but I tend to think part of my duty as a rap critic is to dig through all kinds of scenes—even the ones that seem doomed, cursed, and exploited—and find what is worth discussing, one way or another. And I think there’s a lot of musical creativity and thoughtful songwriting still to be found in the best drill, often overshadowed by intentionally shocking music with little artistic merit. Reemo doesn’t belong on a pedestal, but there’s more to his work. Look at “Story About a Youngin,” a reflective joint told in third person where he underlines the circumstances—childhood abuse, failed hoop dreams, loss of matriarchs—that could lead a kid into the dark side of drill. It’s the sort of uncomfortable, heavy-hearted, and melodramatic street rap that has been crossing ethical boundaries in Philly since Beanie Sigel’s The Truth. On Kyriemo Irving, Reemo rarely gives you the chance to separate the music from the context.
