Melodic Drill
Melodic drill is drill music in which the vocals are half sung, usually with Auto-Tune, over the genre's dark, hard-hitting beats.
It keeps drill's heavy 808s and rapid hi-hats but swaps the usual cold, flat delivery for tuneful, often Auto-Tuned singing about pain and loss, frequently over piano loops. The approach grew from Lil Durk, who sang through Auto-Tune in Chicago's drill scene, and spread in the late 2010s through Polo G and New York's Lil Tjay. It sits between drill and melodic rap.
Artists it is known for: Lil Durk, Polo G, Lil Tjay.
- Family
- Hip-Hop & Rap
- On Spotify
- No longer returned by Spotify’s API
- What it is
- A genre
- From
- United States, late 2010s
- Trackify listeners who play it
- 4%
About 3,700 of 83,000 Trackify listeners with public profiles have melodic drill among their top artists of the last four weeks. Rounded; updated 13 November 2026.
Melodic Drill artists
Central Cee
Nemzzz
Knucks
D-Block Europe
Digga
Kidwild
Russ Millions
Freeze corleone
Fumez The Engineer
Mixtape Madness
The melodic 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.