We haven’t written about much drill lately…

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Jonathan Bradley: “I can’t do no shows cause I terrify my city,” Lil Durk rapped in 2013, and as in Chicago, so in Sydney; police scrutiny has all but exiled drill collective OneFour from live performance. The panic that drill can inspire, here and overseas, seems rooted less in its deliberately illegible distinction between reality and performance, but in the way it makes the margins of society visible. Mount Druitt, the ethnically diverse suburb in Sydney’s far west from which OneFour comes, is the kind of place people from other parts of the city don’t tend to go, but, more than that, it’s the kind of place we tend not to think about. More than 20 years after the fact, it might best be known for the time a tabloid mocked a local graduating high school class as failures on its front page. “They are marketing the revulsion for the places they’re from,” is how Twitter user hipstorian described groups like OneFour; he also ties the policing of their music to the limits that policing places on the Pacific Islander communities to which OneFour’s members belong, as well as on other immigrant communities. And that intensely local quality, mirroring perhaps the ties to specific Chicago blocks that artists like Lil Durk accentuate, is what is so apparent and so vital about OneFour’s music: from the slang they use (“urch,” “coey”), to the accents with which they speak, to the places they shoot their videos, to the references they make; I grin every time I hear JM threaten to “have your team all Wet and Wild,” or when he says he’s been “running the ball no question” like he’s an eager kid at footy practice. But he does this over infernal bass swells and a crumpling piano loop that drags us down into the group’s feuds and resentments. “Retaliation is a must/Ain’t no maybes, ifs, or buts” is the icy clarity with which YP opens his verse. The group admires the UK variant of drill, and they are effective at using that style’s characteristic oblique allusions to make their words sound more vivid and more dreadful. “Someone got dipped and shh,” demurs JM, while YP taunts, “Shh got got and he left his uzzo/Shit, and he still out talking tough.” They do it well, but it’s the insistent and dexterous final verse by Lekks, which is less coded and more brutal, that really resonates. “When it goes in ’em, then I push the blade in a few, few more times” he says coldly, and he eventually cuts the song off with gnomic horror: “Souls go missing/I love just fucking twisting.” It’s so effective that it seems uncharitable to undercut it with discussion of the inherently performative nature of art, and whose art is permitted to be performative. Consider instead what else OneFour does beyond terrify their city. Local writer Winnie Dunn described her reaction to the group in an SBS piece: “Places we all visited on the daily were now on the map. We were proud.”
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Oliver Maier: Pretty generic drill fare elevated somewhat by the novelty of ONEFOUR’s Aussie accents, similar to the London inflection associated with the genre but different enough to catch the ear. No verses suggest prodigious talent, but Spenny14 and YP14 provide the standout performances in the middle, the latter’s pulsing flow providing a slick contrast to the former’s rubbery triplets.
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Nortey Dowuona: Shifting synth chords are laid over the spindly percussion, then the heaving, purring bass drums touch down. JM14, Spenny14, YP14 and Lekks14 glide over it, blurring together with the bass.
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Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: The sheer amount of rap here is kind of impressive– four long verses, full of slang and unexpected references– yet nothing really sticks out. In its piano-driven menace, it aspires toward being the Aussie “Pop Out,” but the lack of variation in flows or melodies leaves it flat.
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Ryo Miyauchi: As an introduction to this Australian drill crew, “The Message” does a fine job. That sinister, lulling Juneonnabeat-like synth loop sets the tone like you turned into the wrong corner, and OneFour provides ruggedness. I wish there were a few more moments where the rappers experiment with what else the beat has to offer in terms of flow. Spenny14 and his slanted double-time, then, is the standout, especially coming between the gruff, attitude-heavy flow of JM that the other two in the latter half carry on.
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Iain Mew: I’d be hard-pressed to choose a favourite verse from “The Message.” That might be testament to the distance I’m listening to it from, but also says something about how well they all line up with the dim-lit rattle of the beat. The abrupt final twist (literally on the word “twisting”) comes as a surprise because it feels like they could confidently keep going all night.
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