There’s always been a magical undercurrent in UK drill. Those gliding bass lines are writhing, sinuous and diabolically serpentine. The funeral march pianos and cathedral reverbs have their religious connotations. The lyrical preoccupation with numbers is like alchemy or 5%er stuff. You get those hexing sorceress vocals in things like ‘waps’.
But it’s always been overshadowed by the social realist elements of the music. The mantra-like nature of UK drill often ends up sounding more apathetic than trance-inducing. There’s something washed out and grayscale about the music that detracts from its imaginative potential. It sounds like Lambeth on an overcast day.
What’s great about these Woo 2 bits is that the magic is front and centre. The cavernous reverb, the dragon scale autotune, the “murmurs from a Martian crypt” (to coin a phrase)... it’s all so enchanting.