Jonah Bromwich invented trillwave.
The song’s called “Trill Hip Hop.” The spoken introduction goes as follows: “Greetings friends and associates. This is what we like to call trill hip hop. Laid back vibe. With just a pinch of gangsterism.”
The first verse fulfills that exact promise. After all, “Trill Hip Hop” is a Texas variation on “Gangsta Shit,” a song which was reliably pretty good and occasionally great, but whose title didn’t exactly raise expectations. And this is trill. True. Real. Easygoing. That slow Houston bounce. Rob Gullate is unusually smooth for a newcomer. A very respectable effort and a good discovery all around. As Gullate says at the end of the first verse, “Frito Lay vibes.”
And then we hit the second verse and it’s no longer just trill, not just a bag of chips. I honestly had to go back and check the video just to see if it was the same guy, because everything is amped on the second half of the song. In just this one verse we get snapshots of a bi-polar mother selling her body to make a living, a Kill Bill reference combined with an exhortation for kids to read more, a weed boast which leads into a girl boast in which the girl is suddenly humanized, and then a double-take flow switch to round out the verse.
Once Gullate starts to rap like this, it brings the beat to life in a whole new way; his flow dips in and out of the shaky vocal as if he’s weaving circles around a solitary woman in distress, which works as an implicit metaphor for the struggle described that glues everything together. On the spoken introduction to the second verse, Gullate claims “we really rap man,” something else that any fan has heard rappers say time and time again. But if he keeps making good on these banal promises with the kind of fire he displays here, people are going to start taking notice.
