Lil Herb

These days, I have a hard time going back to a lot of old Chicago drill. Sure, a handful of the best rap songs and mixtapes of the 2010s came from that scene, but fire up vintage Zacktv interviews or D Gainz and A Zae Production music videos and it’s like sitting through an in memoriam segment: nothing but decade-old clips of teenagers and early twentysomethings who are now dead, in jail, experiencing mental health issues, or exiled from their hometown. They could’ve been or They should’ve been is how most of the comments read underneath the clips. One of the last few standing to tell the story is G Herbo, maybe the hardest rapper of the entire generation.

I’m not normally a you-had-to-be-there type of guy, but when G Herbo first hit YouTube as Lil Herb—a scrawny, Polo-wearing 16-year-old kid with the burly voice of a cigarette-smoking grown man—the explosive rhymes of “Kill Shit” and “Gangway” had my New York City high school on lock. Back then, outside of Wayne and Meek Mill, it was rare that our anthems were by out-of-towners, but to this day a lot of my friends still talk about Herb with the gravitas NBA prospects do Paul George. Looking back it makes sense—compared to, say, the Gucci-like numbness of Chief Keef or the Bone Thugs-lite rap-sing of Lil Durk, Herb’s Southern influences (Three 6 Mafia and Project Pat; I’ve never heard him talk about Houston rap but sometimes the hulking rasp of his voice makes me think about the Screwed Up Click dudes) were dusted with streaks of East Coast traditionalism. If he’d been born 10 years earlier he might’ve been wreaking havoc on jacked beats with Major Figgas. That combination has given him the flexibility to adapt to the fast-moving micro-eras of rap and gradually shift his perspective as he’s gotten older.

Freshly 30, G Herbo keeps on growing along with his music on Lil Herb, a loose concept album, mostly recorded in Chicago, that reflects on the original era of drill with a level of clarity that no other rapper has yet. Herb goes about that by tweaking the heat-of-the-moment POV of classic drill for one that puts him back in the shoes of his teenage self. It’s almost like hearing the narrator of The Sandlot flash back to the summer that shaped his life.

Herb’s storytelling is vivid and lived-in, oscillating between wistfulness for simpler times when he was hustling to get fly and all his friends were still alive and the anxiety of living through violence and disarray with a deep focus on the hard-earned lessons along the way. On “Give It All,” backdropped by a dreamy piano riff, he takes us through his entire childhood in two and a half minutes: From the days when he was a broke kid hooping, riding the bus, and hitting on girls at juke parties to losing his innocence with guns, beefs, and orgies. The pained inner monologue of the soulful “Fallen Soldiers” has a novelistic level of detail—you get the names, the locations, the conflicted emotions—as he struggles with how to respond to all the death around him. Sharpest of all is “Blitz,” where the hunger bursts from him like Dreamchasers 2-era Meek over a beat that smashes together ballistic drums and nonstop gunshots. The choice to rap over spraying bullets is as mesmerizingly cool as it is eerie, like it’s a memory he can’t shake.

The knock I have on almost all of G Herbo’s studio albums, though, is that they take the idea of being an album too seriously, meaning there’s notes hit for no reason except that’s what big albums are supposed to do. On Lil Herb, it’s stuff like “Every Night,” the sweeping choir intro that flat-out explains all of the emotions he’ll be dealing with on the record. I’d much rather listen to “Radar,” which has writing that ties those feelings to specific scenes: “You ever lived through a nightmare?/Look death in the face, he might stare/Somebody try and kill you right there/You can’t depend on nothin’ but Nike Airs.” Then there’s the obligatory radio cuts like the Jeremih-assisted ode to his girl “Whatever U Want” and “Thank Me,” with Anderson .Paak, which has the cutesiness of Coloring Book. His heart doesn’t seem in them, which is not the case with the two-hander he pulls off with Wyclef Jean by just rapping hard as fuck like he normally does.

If I were arguing with someone in a bar about how good of a rapper I believe G Herbo to be, I probably wouldn’t use any of his albums as the sole example. I think of him almost like I do Jadakiss, where the catalog is as much and maybe even more about the mix of pop and underground features, freestyles, and one-offs. There’s a sense of humor and rhyme scheme playfulness infused into G Herbo’s stories (like the ones on his mixtape from earlier this year, Greatest Rapper Alive, where he just rips a bunch of classic rap beats) that tends to be a little muted when it’s time to go plaque-hunting.

But Lil Herb is as close as he’s ever gotten to capturing that full picture. “Went Legit,” the biggest hit of his career despite having no hook, is full of sharp slice-of-life bars that are kinda funny and kinda real at the same time. On “Longevity,” Herb sounds like he’s on a Kay Slay tape with the way he fools around with enunciation and spelling: “In a trap, 17, I touch C, D, and E/One of my brothers in a bing, just seen me on BET/Dropped out of everything and I ain’t get no GED/Took myself off EBT, the crib look like a B&B.” He works in these stylish touches without losing sight of the album’s message. “Think back, if it weren’t for rap, where would I be instead?” he asks himself on the uptempo “Reason,” slightly switching up his flow to give an answer: “Probably jail, probably, probably dead, probably.” It’s like one big sigh of relief.