Like Chief Keef, Lil Durk, and many others before him, Polo G’s early success was quite literally a ticket out of town. Not long after recording his major-label debut Die a Legend, the northside Chicago rapper packed up his family and moved to Los Angeles in an attempt to avoid fulfilling the prophecy of his album’s title. And while going to LA to work in music is a common migration, it tends to be as much of a survival tactic as it is a career move for Chicago rappers. Polo G remains a fervent booster of his hometown, but the move has clearly changed his perspective. How could it not?
To that end, his latest LP Hall of Fame is as much Hollywood as it is Chiraq. Polo’s style of melodic drill—sparse compositions comprising soft piano melodies and gentle guitars atop booming basslines—is tailored to convey emotion, an intentional diversion from the bleak murder raps of drill’s first wave. His Auto-Tune croon of a flow blurs the lines between hook and verse, with few wasted moments; almost every song is at or under three minutes. And by this point, Polo has helped shift drill so far into the mainstream that twinkling ballads like “Epidemic” have as much in common with Ed Sheeran as they do Lil Durk.
But wherever you go, the memories of lost loved ones follow, and death continues to loom large in Polo’s music. His career has been defined by an exploration of the depths of his trauma to cope with funeral fatigue and the creeping normalization of people around him dying young. Upon the release of Die a Legend, he lamented to Pitchfork, “After a kid in our school dies at 13, no therapists are there. We just deal with it ourselves.” It’s not a tragedy, but an inevitability. Two years later, Polo has put out the most hopeful—and commercial—record of his career. While his first two LPs coped with death (often with pills), Hall of Fame finds him facing forward: Father to a young son, poised for fame and looking to leave behind the drugs that would numb his pain but take his friend.
Polo is far from the first rapper to show a sensitive side, but his perspective feels particularly empathetic and self-aware. He doesn’t just lament the violence that colored his upbringing—he seems to understand better than most how that trauma manifests, coloring his verses with poignant moments that tell entire stories. “Ain’t no limit in these streets/Can ride a bike, you old enough,” he raps on “Black Hearted.” He still wields considerable talent as a lyricist, dropping brazen one-liners as deftly as he transitions from gun-toting villain (“Aim for the head, that chopper spray/We get ’em gone”) to mixtape-making loverboy (“I got a playlist for your heart, girl, pick a song”)—sometimes in the same verse. But he also seems to be running out of ways to describe familiar scenes, like the image of blood soaking into a white t-shirt on both “Boom” and “RAPSTAR.”