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. It’s hard to ignore that the scene feels so over the top and stagey, you almost forget you’re listening to some of the darkest music out there. Actually, maybe it’s not that easy to forget.
With West Philly’s Reemo, the weight of his words is never an afterthought. Unlike all those costume rappers lurking in the city’s shadows, he is the contemplative traditionalist, light on gimmicks. Reemo’s new mixtape, Kyriemo Irving—which features some sick illustrated cover art of him going for a finger roll in hell, while an opponent points a gun in the air like Wood Harris in *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 isn’t exactly a technical buzzsaw like those two, 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. You can hear the coffee shop steam hissing in the background of the studio—or maybe that’s just the grit in his delivery—but he’s clearly focused on the human emotions that a lot of modern drill skips in favor of hollow menace.
I wouldn’t call 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, generic soul-sample beats, and maybe too much time spent on—well, let’s just say he’s obsessed with other dudes’ girlfriends. That would irk me more if the writing wasn’t otherwise sharp and tonally flexible.
He can be genuinely 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 pivots to a story about scaring his latest fling with his PTSD-induced nightmares and cold sweats. It’s messy, but “Ray Lewis” is a raw vignette with a King Von level of violent detail, but an unexpected dose of—I don’t know, it’s dreamy in a way you don’t expect.