Drill
Drill is a dark, hard style of hip hop from Chicago with ominous beats and blunt lyrics about street violence.
It began on the city's South Side in the early 2010s, when Chief Keef and producer Young Chop paired slow, menacing trap-style beats with deadpan, often Auto-Tuned delivery. London musicians then reshaped it into UK drill, with faster drums and sliding 808 bass, and that version fed back into Brooklyn drill. Its lyrics are colder and more direct than most trap.
Artists it is known for: Chief Keef, Lil Durk, Pop Smoke.
- Family
- Hip-Hop & Rap
- On Spotify
- A current genre
- What it is
- A genre
- From
- Chicago, early 2010s
- Also called
- drill music
- Trackify listeners who play it
- 15%
About 12,000 of 83,000 Trackify listeners with public profiles have drill among their top artists of the last four weeks. Rounded; updated 13 November 2026.
Drill artists
Chief Keef
Dave
Central Cee
Nemzzz
King Von
Pop Smoke
Denzel Curry
Lil Durk
UZI
KnucksThe drill artists most Trackify listeners have in their top fifty. Each opens on Spotify.
Sources
The definition is written for this site from open sources, and was checked against them on 13 November 2026.