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 quite like the scene in Philadelphia. In recent years, Philly drill rappers have turned the genre’s complicated brutality into a form of theatrical horrorcore—heavy on hoops analogies and dense with religious symbolism. The most famous of the bunch is Skrilla, who merged those evil-ass choir-drill beats, popularized by local guys like Ot7Quanny and Lil Buckss, with darkly spiritual and admittedly memeable lyricism. Deeper under the surface, masked showmen like HappyDranker and Tovi fill their drowned-out diss tracks with mythmaking that feels straight out of a comic book.
The scene is so over-the-top that you forget you’re listening to some of the darkest music out right now. Or maybe you don’t forget—maybe the absurdity is the point.
With West Philly’s Reemo, the weight of his words is never an afterthought. In comparison to all the costume rappers lurking in the city’s shadows, he is a contemplative traditionalist, light on gimmicks. His new mixtape, Kyriemo Irving—featuring some sick illustrated cover art where he’s going for a finger roll at a playground in hell—is full of hungry day-in-the-life raps and meditations on fate. He pulls from the school of Meek Mill and G Herbo, and while he isn’t a technical buzzsaw like them, he has that same style of breathless, urgent 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 track “OverKill.” He sounds worn-down, like someone recovering from a really bad cold. I can practically hear the radiator clicking in the room while he records. He’s thinking about the actual human emotions that a lot of modern drill skips in favor of surface-level menace. I wouldn’t go so far as to call Reemo an old soul, though. He fully embraces the blunted flows and high-stakes drama that are integral to the Philly drill sound right now.
He does run into the same pitfalls as a lot of other rappers on the circuit when stretching bars into a full-length project—too many mushy Creed-style montage beats, like the generic soul samples on “Life Is Good.” And honestly, maybe too much time spent on—actually, never mind, let’s just say he spends a lot of time on other dudes’ girlfriends. It would irk me more if the writing wasn’t otherwise so sharp and tonally flexible. He can be legitimately funny, like when he declares messing with a broke girl to be as much of a taboo as eating pork.
He spits random Marcus Camby and Udonis Haslem punchlines, then pivots to a story about scaring his latest fling with PTSD-induced nightmares and cold sweats. The track “Ray Lewis” is a raw, violent vignette with a King Von level of detail, but it’s anchored by an unexpected dose of dreaminess. It’s messy, it’s sharp, and it stays with you longer than the stage-show antics of his peers.