Upholding Brooklyn’s tradition of invention, 22Gz stands tall at the forefront of Brooklyn Drill. He didn’t just set the template though; he consistently rewrote the rulebook with every subsequent release, leading the pack and even lending “Blixky” to the lexicon. Beyond the metallic ironclad beats, viral dances, hundreds of millions of streams, and think pieces by Vulture, The Source, Pitchfork, and Noisey, he has cast a long shadow over the genre with a combination of menacing melodies and razor-sharp rhymes. Toughened up by the trauma of his father’s murder, the tribulations of being raised by his older sisters, and trouble of his own with the law, he lit the match for the Brooklyn Drill movement with “Suburban” in 2017. Pitchfork christened it “the first Brooklyn Drill song worth a damn,” and he ended up with a deal from Kodak Black’s Sniper Gang in partnership with Atlantic Records. After popping off with The Blixky Tape in 2019, he lived up to the title of his next project, Growth & Development, a year later. “Suburban Pt. 2” went crazy to the tune of almost 100 million streams and 23 million YouTube views. In its aftermath, Complex cited him as “a trailblazer of Brooklyn drill music,” and HYPEBEAST posited, “22Gz is one of the main reasons Brooklyn’s drill scene made its way to the masses.” On The Blixky Tape 2 and more music on the horizon, 22Gz proudly asserts himself as “The Brooklyn Drill G.O.A.T.”