Like many new rappers, what makes G Herbo interesting is his relationship to the present: how he makes his art speak to both his reality and his generation. But what defines Humble Beast is how he weaves the past to the present, tying forgotten threads of hip-hop tradition to his firm hold on the zeitgeist. It’s not a project consumed with looking backward, trying to recapture some past glory. Rather, it’s a young artist pushing himself, exploring the genre’s history to find pathways relevant to him now. Crucially, his pivot towards narratives and soul samples is a necessary bit of reframing, a signal of “maturity” and moral responsibility forced upon drill artists who’ve been unfairly typecast and pathologized as one-dimensional purveyors of violence.

G Herbo’s first major record was 2012’s “Kill Shit” alongside frequent collaborator Lil Bibby. It was the song that launched a thousand songs, the primary blueprint for much of the New York and UK drill scenes. The core of his sound, though—the part that makes him one of the genre’s most relevant new stars, and pushes the genre’s sound well past those imitators—is not riding this one approach until the wheels fall off, as others are wont to do. Instead, his strength is a particular sense of songcraft, a skill which proved itself again on his 2015 Chicago summer smash “I’m Rollin,” and extends here to its twin singles, “I Like” and “Everything.” These are records which chart new waters not just for drill artists, but for rap music broadly by tapping into his core audience and pushing new styles in response. Here is where he earns his role as a leader.

A common denominator of these bigger hits is a sensation of taking up space. His vocals fill the canvas, a maximalist rap style which prefers bold gestures to subtle ones. While most artists would be tempted to use an Uzi Vert feature for his heralded songwriting skills, “Everything” is a Herbo record through-and-through. Brash rapping bulldozes through equally tough production, a clenched fist crashing through a brick-wall beat. The song’s concept, while not especially creative on the surface, is executed with a subtle musicality that operates as one gripping hook after another.

On “I Like,” he takes a slightly more relaxed approach—this is, after all, a “for the ladies”-type record, albeit the most aggressive-sounding one in recent memory. Yet this shift to a semi-casual tone is what gives his in-your-face intensity the ability to surprise, zigging when you expect it to zag. “I Like”’s sexual politics may be fairly retrograde, but part of its appeal is its no-nonsense bluntness, a sense of getting to the honest point. Its hooks, cacophonous production, and memorable phraseology (“My name’s G Herbo/I like nasty bitches!” is an unforgettable introduction) are compositional tools, not just “beats” or “lyrics” but the animating force of coherence at the heart of his work.

His compositional skills on these album highlights—alongside lyrical exercises like “Bi Polar,” and pleasantly unexpected left-turns like the spare curiosity “This n That” with Lil Yachty and Jeremih—suggest that his best songs help redefine the boundaries and borders of the genre’s current moment. Yet Humble Beast as a whole is more ambitious than this—it has to be. His similarity to New York rappers always suggested a lineage descended from the Lox, rather than the southern influence of Gucci Mane. The above singles aside, a bulk of the tracks on Humble Beast rely on a post-Kanye/Just Blaze/Bink-style soul sampling, giving it the feel of a lost major label album of the mid-aughts. Its best moments, like the riveting storytelling cut “Malcolm,” feel like a rediscovery of hip-hop’s forgotten narrative possibilities, especially when coming from an artist whose fanbase is young enough not to remember who the Lox is in the first place. Far from a cynical marketing pivot, moments like this suggest an organic curiosity in the traditions of his art.

Lyrically, his style throughout Humble Beast is more blues-inflected than the archetypal East Coast rap record, sticking to personal stories, the names of friends and streets, burrowing into his conflicted emotions, and veering away from punchlines and wordplay. His vocals still power through the production, his brawny verses like purposefully rough outlines of a pencil drawing. In some ways, his writing is still developing; the effortless, artful sophistication of Chicago legend Bump J’s standout verse on “Crown” is a master class, and it’s no slight to G Herbo to say he stands in his shadow.

Humble Beast feels musically bifurcated between its street and soul segments; a street-soul production synthesis could give his sound some cohesion, and giving his reflective moments a contemporary canvas could only increase their urgency. Likewise, the same compositional talent he brings to records like “I Like” and “Everything” doesn’t gleam as brightly when the songs tilt lyrical and autobiographical, though his emergent narrative style still carries a strong emotive power. One gets the sense he’s still working out his comfort level in these moments. With some exceptions (“Malcolm,” “Man Now”), those songs lack the seductive qualities of his best songwriting, where his undeniable, muscular intensity demands attention, and sets him apart among the best young rappers currently working.