THE VOICE OF NEW YORK IS DRILL

It's the most captivating sound the city has heard in decadesand also the most misunderstood.

NEW YORK COMES alive in the summer. All that pent-up kinetic energy from the long winter collects, then the fire hydrants crack open and the colliding pressures coursing through each block and borough burst onto every sidewalk. It’s open season for the good and the ugly, and for the past three years, summer in the city—the whole city—has sounded like drill music. Just over a decade ago, a sprawling ecosystem of mainly teenagers in Chicago’s South Side who grew up with trap’s mixture of no-holds-barred realism and aspirational escapism found a way to distill the conflicting feelings of their neighborhood into a new rap subgenre. Drill—pushed into the mainstream by artists like Chief Keef and translated as far and wide as London and, later, Brooklyn and the Bronx—created a potent, grisly language for a community to talk to itself about what it meant to call a metropolitan war zone home. It got its name from the kill-or-be-killed mentality (the word literally means “to shoot”), a code wherein black-and-white ideas about morality are sacrificed in the name of survival. There is an unflinching sense of desperation reflected in drill. Like all hip-hop, it is a culture born of suffering and a desire to alchemize the pain, and so, like many rap scenes before it, the music and those making it have been misread as causing harm instead of working through harm done.