Shawny Binladen and the rise of sample drill

For Shawny Binladen and his collective the Yellow Tape Boys, sampling is a sacred act — the highest form of respect.

Photo by GShotEm

After Pop Smoke’s tragic death in 2020, many wondered what would become of New York drill, and many naysayers claimed it died with him. Over the next year, several booming voices would knock at that door, but the man who broke it down was one who raps in whispers. 27-year-old Queens rapper Shawny Binladen’s reimagination of drill music opened up a new world of possibilities by calling on a practice foundational to hip-hop: sampling. There may never be another King of New York — but Shawny Binladen is the King of Samples.

Sample drill didn’t invent sampling in drill. A few songs previously relied on samples in one-off ventures; Sleepy Hallow’s “Deep End Freestyle,” for example, sampled a vocal loop that singer-songwriter Fousheé had originally uploaded to a royalty-free database called Splice, laying it over minimalist, fixed percussion. But it wasn’t until Shawny that the concept of “sample drill” was born. Drill flips of clearly communicated (and often widely-recognizable) samples became a pillar of a new collective sound, and eventually the basis for a new subgenre, breathing new life into the gloomy severity of drill production.

The songs flip everything — from Daft Punk to Kanye to Dick Dale & the Deltones. Sample drill’s explosion has been largely fueled by TikTok, and many staple tracks have a tongue-in-cheek feel, playing at a certain attention-grabbing contrast (like Dthang, Bando & T Dot’s “Talk Facts,” which samples Gotye’s “Somebody That I Used to Know”). Some records, like Kyle Ricch & Jenn Carter’s JoJo-sampling “do what you want,” rely on teenage…