“No one cared who I was until I put on a mask...”
The image of a drill rapper is unlike that of any other musician. Since the sound spread from Chicago to London in the 2010s, artists have twisted their identities in increasingly subversive, creative and practical ways, masking up in videos, creating myths and refusing to reveal government names to the press. But as viral musicians step out of obscurity and their influence bleeds across the Atlantic, where is drill identity headed from here?
TeeZandos has a complicated public image. “If you asked a random drill fan to describe me they would literally say, ‘Oh, the girl that worships the devil’, says the 19-year-old drill rapper. “It keeps people on their toes, but no. It’s kind of like people got the wrong idea from what I said. But I just let it go anyways. I don’t care.”
Zandos grew up in Hackney and has several viral singles to her name, including last year’s “Highlander”, “Phone Call” (with emerging southeast London drill star Fizzler) and the recent “UH”. She broke through in 2019 with the head-rattling single “Need Focus”, which saw the rapper declare herself “Satan’s disciple” in
