There’s a drill variant in nearly every major city in America, but none seems interested in dragging your moral contradictions into the same fluorescent spotlight like the scene in Philadelphia.
Philly drill rappers have spent recent years turning the genre’s complicated brutality into something closer to theatrical horrorcore—heavy on hoops analogies and religious symbolism. One of the best-known names is Skrilla, who mixed evil-ass choir-drill beats (popularized locally by guys like Ot7Quanny and Lil Buckss) with darkly spiritual, memeable lyricism and exploitative world-building. Under that, masked showmen like HappyDranker and Tovi keep feeding drowned-out diss tracks with mythmaking that feels lifted straight from comic books. The whole thing can be so over the top and stagey that you almost forget you’re still listening to one of drill’s darkest permutations.
With West Philly’s Reemo, though, the weight of his words isn’t an afterthought. Compared with the more costume-y rappers in the city’s shadows, he comes off like the contemplative traditionalist—light on gimmicks. His new mixtape, Kyriemo Irving, has that instantly attention-grabbing illustrated cover art: 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. It’s one of those visuals that sticks in your head, even before the first bar lands.
The songs mostly focus on hungry day-in-the-life raps and meditations on fate, pulled from the school of Meek and G Herbo. He’s not trying to be a technical buzzsaw—still, his breathless storytelling is handled with confidence. On the jazzy “OverKill,” he raps, “And them funerals when you know you got to get back for the dead, that’s a horrible feeling,” with a worn-down voice that sounds like someone recovering from a bad cold. It’s a small detail, but you can almost hear it: the rasp, the hesitation before the punchline, the way the emotion lands without needing extra noise.
He’s thinking about human emotions that a lot of modern drill skips in favor of menace. Still, I wouldn’t call Reemo an old soul exactly. He embraces the blunted flows and drama that are integral to Philly drill of the moment—sometimes even when the subject matter feels quieter. On “In the Past,” he mutters, “She look in my eyes, I can’t lie to her/Even my mom know we the ones giving vacations,” over faded, 42 Dugg-core drums. Then again, the mixtape isn’t perfect; if you stretch bars out across a full-length project, you start running into the same traps other rappers hit on the circuit.
The writing is sharp and tonally flexible, but there are issues. He leans too hard into mushy Creed montage beats—especially the generic soul samples of “Life Is Good” and “Hoop on the Road.” There’s also too much time spent on fucking other dudes’ girlfriends, which is… yeah, it’s the sort of obsession that makes you want to skip ahead and grab a diary from wherever it got buried. And yet, oddly, the project doesn’t fall apart because of it. He can be funny: he frames messing with a broke girl as a taboo on the same level as eating pork. He spits Marcus Camby and Udonis Haslem punchlines, then swings into a story about scaring his latest fling with PTSD-induced nightmares and cold sweats. “Ray Lewis” lands as a raw vignette with King Von level of violent detail, but it also comes with an unexpected dose of dreaminess and sentimentality—like the track is holding two moods at once, and doesn’t fully apologize for either.
Maybe that’s the point of Kyriemo Irving. It’s drill, sure, but it’s also trying to locate something human underneath the performance. And that’s the part that lingers—especially when the music keeps moving, even if your own thoughts aren’t done following it.
