Grime renaissance aside, in the last couple of years London road rap has diverged down two paths. One led to the sunlit uplands where J Hus, Kojo Funds, and Belly Squad lean-and-bop to autotuned afrobeat. The other swerved south of the river, into the icy underworld of UK drill.

Drill originated in Chicago, going global in 2012 via rapper Chief Keef and a round of pants-wetting from the liberal media. The UK version obviously owes a huge debt to the genre: it deploys the same melancholic, trap-tinged beats, the same slang, and the same nihilistic fixation on violence. But differences have emerged, not least the fact that the mainstream press has almost totally ignored UK drill. Most obviously, AutoTune is all but absent from its UK version. Keef uses his mournful voice as an instrument, blurring with the stabs of the synth, but British drillers use a harsh, stripped-back delivery indebted to grime. The two-step space which echoes in grime instrumentals also billows through UK drill beats. There are exceptions – American drillers can go sparse and UK drillers can get hype – but the London sound is far less lush than the Chicagoan original.

Writing about US drill in Chicago magazine, Whet Moser said that “it’s not even fatalistic, because that would imply a self-consciousness, a moral consideration, that isn’t there in the lyrics. It just is, over and over again.” Thanks in part to close scrutiny from the Met, UK rappers have developed a more ironic and allusive style, couched in a distinctive South London patois – ‘ten toes’, ‘ding-dong’, the Arabic akhi for brother. The playfulness of lines like “trapping’s not great… it’s lovely” goes hand in hand with a self-identification as ‘grubby’. This is music for cold, rainy streets, kebab joints and filthy trap houses, not swanky clubs and mansions.

Similarly, UK drill is defined by an estate-bound, hyper-local mentality. In a scene structured around pre-existing gang rivalries, crews bang out not for their city or their borough, but for the fifth and sixth digits of their phone number. UK drillers invade their rivals’ favoured chicken shops and urinate on their street signs, while YouTube commenters track skyrocketing ‘scoreboards’ of stabbings in and around Brixton.

But despite media indifference, a lingering indebtedness to American culture, and a culture of tit-for-tat violence which has left scores of youths stabbed and several dead, UK drill is at the brink of the mainstream. These are the collectives doing the most to push it onto the global stage.

67

“67 are on your clart and you ain’t on nuttin,” the rapper formerly known as Chipmunk told Yungen during their highly-publicised beef last year. The mere mention of the Brixton Hill crew allegedly silenced Yungen, and solidified 67 as the top dogs in the UK drill food chain. Key man Scribz spent years rapping under a pseudonym and a DOOM-like mask, thanks to a court injunction banning him from any media appearances. Though 67 incorporated the ban into their mystique (“no face, no case” ), it showed how the Met police systematically frustrate drill rappers’ attempts to switch street crime for the music industry. Seminal early track “Live Corn” directly borrowed a beat from Chicago driller LA Capone, himself shot dead at the age of 17. But they’ve come a long way since then. Mixtapes 6ix 7even and In Skengs We Trust are among the most cohesive statements yet from a scene still defined by YouTube hood videos and Snapchat leaks, while UK hip hop godfather Giggs gave them the Peckham seal of approval on last year’s crossover hit “Let’s Lurk”.