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If a video game allowed you to create a rapper with all the statistics needed to attract mass attention in today’s digital climate, the figure you end up with might look like Philadelphia newcomer Skrilla. Physically, he’s regionless—or, better yet, doesn’t read as belonging to a specific American city. His understated fashion sense (primarily all black) is indicative of present-day Northeastern simplicity, where Nike Tech sweatsuits, Under Armour tracksuits, North Face bubble jackets reign. His long dreads and mouthful of gold slugs could land him below the Mason-Dixon or even in the Bay Area. Musically, his work isn’t technically drill because it doesn’t prioritize violence but, in texture and sound, it evokes palpable darkness. The distribution and use of addictive substances is a recurring theme in his work. And, most crucial to his rise over the past year, Skrilla is adept at engineering a mixture of fascination and revulsion with his visual output; you’ll want to look away out of sheer discomfort while still sneaking a peek because you can’t believe what’s happening.
The rapper staunchly represents Kensington—or, as he calls it, ZombieLand—a section of Philly that has long drawn headlines due to what’s often called the biggest open-air drug market in the United States. Like many deindustrialized areas along the Rust Belt, the neighborhood is weathering an opioid crisis; images of folks maimed by faulty injections or inebriated to the point of immobility have become fodder for social media spectacle in a way that, at the very least, feels like barely cloaked exploitation. However genuine his connection to the area and its citizens, this is the foundation of Skrilla’s rap persona. For the past two years, his videos and performances have featured, to varying degrees, people noticeably dealing with addiction. Sometimes they surround him while he’s rapping, many clearly uncomfortable in front of the camera. Sometimes they gleefully dance along to the brooding production. Sometimes, he’s administering Narcan to save someone from an overdose.
Zombie Love Kensington Paradise, Skrilla’s late 2024 project, underlined his affinity for the neighborhood while displaying his vocal flexibility and off-kilter delivery. A new deluxe version, which adds eight new tracks to the existing 19, suggests that, at his best, the Philly native could very well be on the road to rap stardom. Zombie Love’s deluxe starts with the Thankutimmy and Paculiarbeatz-produced “Big Opp,” a convincing opener in which Skrilla makes a compelling case for his skill for knowing how to utilize space. Rather quickly, he goes from listing off a number of potent substances (codeine, horse tranquilizers, oxycodone) to gleefully talking about his taste in fashion before stressing that he has folks around him that’ll handle his dirty work. Delivered in a congested whine, it’s busy but still measured. There’s no hook—most of his songs don’t bother with having one. Instead, Skrilla administers chapter breaks with signature outbursts like “Goooo,” “What the fuuucck?” and “It’s me!”
Throughout the project, those vocal qualifiers are paired with a production style that’s become synonymous with Philly’s new wave of street music. From Ot7 Quanny to Hood Tali to Lil Buckss and beyond, the city’s rendition of drill is characterized by its minimalism: ominous chord loops, very sharp claps, spaced-out 808s, and not much else. That leaves ample room for Skrilla’s scattered musings. “Palo Mayombe,” which follows a similar template, continues Skrilla’s years-long interest in West and Central African spirituality—something he says he’s practiced at home since childhood. When he fantasizes about hopping out of his car to shoot an adversary, he stresses that he’s protected by Ogun, to whom he sacrifices chickens (if you follow him on Instagram, you’ve seen the aftermath). On the slightly more uptempo Prod.Yari-produced “NYFW,” he elects for a more animated flow and raises his voice to the point of cracking.
Zombie Love's most fun addition to its deluxe version is “ABC,” a song that was initially performed as an On The Radar freestyle in January of 2024 where Skrilla—exercising his love for spectacle—hilariously wore a brown Viking beard mask. Produced by Broward County’s Trippy XVI, Skrilla builds on the age-old hip-hop tradition of rapping your way through the alphabet. In his version, E is for the ecstasy he enjoys, R is for running on the plug, and, of course, Z is for ZombieLand. He cleverly breaks up the predictable nature of this formula by periodically repeating back letters to himself as to suggest he actually might be genuinely freestyling. The feverish way he powers through songs frames Skrilla as something of a twisted rap jester—a person who harnesses dark forces while appearing either indifferent or amused.
It doesn’t always click, mostly due to his inability to trim the fat. If most of Zombie Love Kensington Paradise—deluxe or original—had observed this balance of Philly drill, African spirituality, perfectly paced flows, and a healthy amount of shit-talking, it would be a much stronger project. Unfortunately, Skrilla often prioritizes collaboration with fellow upstarts, hard-to-turn-down features, and random experimentation. On “Maybach Seats” and “On That Money,” popular New Orleans rapper Rob49 throws around inconsequential lines; each song would have been better without him, but the way today’s street rap ecosystem operates, cross-country networking is essential to extend one’s reach. Lil Baby sounds lost on “Talk,” where he tries to adopt Skrilla’s start-and-stop approach to make his voice fit on a sinister Philly drill beat. “F.W.A.G.” and “Wockstar” are attempts at making melodic music aimed at a love interest, but both feel like bad impressions of South Florida’s Loe Shimmy.
Despite the missteps, Skrilla impresses when he dances through harrowing beats, coloring outside the lines to bring something jovial to what is otherwise sinister. He’s a rap weirdo following a long lineage of Philadelphia hip-hop outliers. At face value, maybe you don’t align his output to predecessors like Santigold, Tierra Whack (who has repeatedly shouted him out), or Lil Uzi Vert (the two have a handful of unofficial collaborations), but he’s closer to them than he is Meek Mill, Beanie Sigel, or even Ot7 Quanny. It’s just gonna take a little more time to find out whether his music will outshine his excessive use of shock value. So much music in the realm of drill already depends on caricature to accentuate its validity. If ZombieLand and its denizens are sources of Skrilla’s love and the cherished community he claims it to be, he should probably consider ways of exhibiting that relationship that run counter to treating it like a Youtuber conducting hood safaris.
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More than most bands that began in the backseat of the family car, Car Seat Headrest seem well-suited for a high-concept rock opera. From the band’s earliest days, when the project was just Will Toledo recording alone in Virginia, songs were never just as simple as singer and subject—his 2011 album Twin Fantasy was a romantic epic sheepishly masquerading as a ramshackle emo record. His 2020 record Making a Door Less Open was essentially a treatise on fame itself, and culminated in Toledo adopting the persona “Trait,” a gas-masked, bunny-eared protagonist previously introduced in a Car Seat Headrest side project called 1 Trait Danger. When Car Seat Headrest began teasing their new record, The Scholars, via an alternate reality game-style website, it felt like an appropriately elaborate rollout for a band who’s rarely taken reality at face value.
And yet, Toledo was hesitant to dive head-on into the full-scale world-building of a rock opera. To hear him tell it, he seemed afraid that he might stumble into one of the genre’s many pitfalls. “You pull something off of The Wall—it’s not necessarily going to be banging on its own. It needs that context,” he told the podcast How Long Gone. “I like when you can pull a song out and have that individual piece.” It’s a brutal assessment of Pink Floyd, though it comes from a deep respect (the original version of Twin Fantasy’s “High to Death” interpolated “Jugband Blues,” after all).
On The Scholars, every song aims to be an “Another Brick in the Wall Pt. 2”—nine self-contained epics that, Toledo hopes, will sum to a greater whole. But overburdened by a confusing plot, with no room for a listener to digest the bevvy of settings and characters he’s just introduced, The Scholars is mired in and muddied by the madcap impulses of its creator, drowning out what would otherwise be some of the band’s most inspired, experimental compositions to date. The Scholars is a rock opera for the playlist era; it wants to contain both a richly textured narrative—with all the character development, internal motivations, and rising and falling action required therein—and also nine songs that can stand alone, plucked out of context and jutted up against whatever other songs happen to land on Spotify’s autoplay.
So, the plot: The Scholars takes us to the imaginary Parnassus University, where we meet a cast of students who are all on parallel searches for meaning: our narrator, the Chanticleer; Beolco, a playwright who’s paranoid his best ideas are behind him: “A thousand ideas piled up in the tomb,” he says on “CCF (I’m Gonna Stay With You)”; Devereaux, the “son of a backwaters religious conservative” who hopes to find higher meaning on the libertine lawns of the American university (“Devereaux”); and Rosa, a medical student who can revive the dead (“Gethsemane”). There is also, of course, a local community based on dressing in furs and feathers (“Lady Gay Approximately”), which I’ll let the Redditors decipher.
These plot points matter as much as you care to listen closely: There are pivotal moments in the form of a deadly plant and clown raid that I somehow missed in the first listen, too distracted by the stylistic changeups and clouded metaphors crammed into every song. Most of the key narrative drivers are buried in liner notes on the lyric sheet but aren't represented anywhere in the music. Certain songs carry enough momentum to warrant repeat listens out of the album context: “The Catastrophe (Good Luck With That, Man)” takes the familiar punk-leaning pop shape that has defined Car Seat Headrest, the chiming strums of an acoustic guitar giving way to drum fills, reverb, and Toledo’s fuzzy, clipped vocals. The same goes for “True/False Lover,” which careens from guitar solo to verse with the practiced ease of someone who’s spent the past 15 years writing hooks.
But the preceding three songs, which range from 10 minutes on the short end to 18 at the longest, test the premise of the album and the patience of the listener. “Gethsemane” begins quietly with just a synth and Toledo’s voice; “Reality” brings to mind Air’s Moon Safari; “Planet Desperation” is the most forthrightly self-serious, with somber piano and the slow beat of a kick drum. Yet they all manage to wind up in about the same place at their halfway points—stuttering prog interludes, towering electric guitar solos, belted refrains that seem to come out of nowhere and fade just as quickly. Storylines are lost in the mayhem: I feel like I’m catching the plot but then as soon as guitarist Ethan Ives, as Parnassus’ Liberal Arts school dean Hyacinth, sings “I would go out/But there’s a world war,” I feel totally lost again. It’s almost impressive how much these disparate modes seem to converge on a central sound, and how much that sound boils down to: play loud, play fast, repeat. There’s a reason, it seems, that The Wall includes comparatively quieter tracks like “Empty Spaces” or “One of My Turns”—if every song needs to stand alone, they each require some sort of internal climax, a summit that feels exhausting to climb song after song.
Still, The Scholars is filled with compelling experimentation and glimpses of greater potential. Toledo’s voice sounds stronger than ever here, warmly recorded in analog, and songs like “Devereaux,” which lean into power pop influences like the Cars and Cheap Trick, feel like the most successful attempt to combine narrative with concise songcraft. “CCF,” one of the album’s standout songs, sounds like a potential future path for Car Seat Headrest—one that introduces elements of jazz and funk to his fundamentally scrappy sound without overpowering it with heavy-handed signifiers and seemingly endless trips up and down the neck of his guitar. Car Seat Headrest is a band almost predestined for the kind of high-stakes storytelling a rock opera requires—if only Toledo could let his own ideas breathe.
