NEW YORK, NY.- Drill music hasn’t always been this fun. The subgenre’s ominous beats and menacing lyrics infiltrated mainstream hip-hop over a decade ago, but its ascendant stars have been stalled by violence, police surveillance and the flattening effect of at-home copycats. Cash Cobain, the 26-year-old breakout rapper and producer from the Bronx, is helping to raise its trajectory. With lusty rhymes and unorthodox samples, he’s become a central figure of “sexy drill,” a more lascivious offshoot, and one that has tilted the sound of rap nationally.

En route to a Coney Island performance in early August, sitting in the passenger seat of a new Mercedes sedan, Cobain rapped along to “Rump Punch,” a song from his upcoming album, as it oozed through the speakers. In between doo-wop-esque lines of flattery for a paramour (“When it comes to pretty, you the pinnacle”), the track sandwiches a hilariously profane offer of oral sex between dreamy keys and a simple repeated drumstick clack.

When people hear his music, he explained, “everyone should feel that, feel like they can’t control their body. Their body just gotta dance because the music is so sexy.”

It’s a sound that has caught the ears of the melodically inclined hornballs that constitute rap’s upper reaches, perhaps best defined by the 2022 moment when Frank Ocean debuted a gold and diamond-studded sex toy for his jewelry line and used a Cobain track to soundtrack the introductory Instagram post. But the lusty stamp that counts most came when Lil Yachty passed along several Cobain beats to Drake, who barely tweaked one for “Calling for You,” a single that reached No. 5 on the Billboard Hot 100. In the past year, Cobain has rapped on tracks he produced for PinkPantheress and Central Cee, Don Toliver and J. Cole.

By the time Cobain was set for a New York City victory lap, a show in April called Slizzy Fest, demand was such that police preemptively shut it down for overcrowding. (Fans got wind that Drake might attend.) Cobain led fans to Union Square and held an open-air show, rapping along to music boosted by a Bluetooth speaker. Born Cashmere Small (yes, his stage name nods to the late Nirvana frontman), Cobain is now on a national tour supporting Ice Spice, the reigning queen of “pop drill” and his collaborator on the remix of “Fisherrr,” a single that has steadily crept East to West across airwaves since its release in February. The song and the tour are a conjoining of drill’s sonic offspring, each taking the sound past its hyperlocal roots. His new album, “Play Cash Cobain,” is set to arrive Friday with cover art by Drake, and it both trades in Cobain’s usual tropes and offers a bunch of groovable swerves.

Amid a pop-rap landscape that writhes in bald sexuality, Cobain’s sound is distinguished by a livelier energy and idiosyncratic choices. The drums don’t appear until almost 40 seconds into the album’s opener, “Slizzyhunchodon.” Cobain swaps drill’s minor-key darkness for major chords, layers in New Jersey club tempos and, most identifiably, whittles unexpected loops from well-chosen samples.

“Some songs you may not know where the hell the hook is at. The beat might not drop until the middle of the song,” he said. “I’m just looking for, like, something different every time.”

His unorthodox approach doesn’t stop internet beatmakers from trying to emulate it. Start typing “Cash Cobain” into a search field and Google and YouTube will autofill “Cash Cobain-type beat.” Video platforms are riddled with producers who’ve set ’90s R&B loops to drill kicks, so much so that his signature tag, which you can hear on every song he produces, announces its legitimacy each time: “got this beat from Cash not from YouTube.”

“It’s the way he just goes about using a loop or a sample within his beat,” said Don Toliver, the platinum-selling Houston rapper. He tapped Cobain’s production and rapping for “Attitude,” the second single from his 2023 album, which features a loop that samples Pharrell Williams singing the first and last “ohs” of the refrain to his 2018 single with Snoop Dogg, “Beautiful.”

“It screams to me like, let’s go, like it’s time to go up,” Toliver said of the track. “So I just wanted to match the energy from me as best as I possibly could.”

Growing up among extended family in the Bronx and later in Queens, Cobain would hear everything from Willie Nelson to Japanese jazz to Billy Ocean, mostly played by a grandmother who majored in world studies in college. But his mother, Priscilla, who had Cobain at 17, steered into the likes of Patti LaBelle, Mary J. Blige, Jodeci and 50 Cent.

The grown-ups bought Baby Cash every cheap drum set and keyboard Toys “R” Us offered until he was old enough to search “beat making” on his grandmother’s desktop computer. He eventually found the demo version of the audio program FL Studio and went on to downloading too-big files and several viruses.

“He would mess up so many computers, I would just rip the hard drives out,” Priscilla said in a video interview. She held a pile of disks in an open palm, letting them slide through her manicured fingers before scooping up more. “He [expletive] them up and we let him.”

Around age 13, Cobain hit the limits of the free beat-making software (“I couldn’t go back to it, edit it, nothing,” he said) and decided he wanted to rap. To do so, he played to Priscilla’s supportive inclination. Riding in her beat-up Volkswagen along Third Avenue in the Bronx, they listened to Lloyd Banks’ “Beamer, Benz or Bentley,” a staple of New York radio that could be endlessly looped to add guest verses. They half-jokingly added their own right there in the car, and Cobain told her they sounded good enough to record — but first he’d need a microphone. She got him a $20 one from a local shop, but he eventually talked her into buying a $300 snowball mic from Guitar Center in 2011, a year before the Chicago rapper Chief Keef’s “I Don’t Like” became an early drill anthem.

By the time the genre permeated New York a few years later, police departments nationwide were connecting the music with gang activity described in its lyrics and by its performers on social media. Though drill artists such as Pop Smoke, Fivio Foreign, Sheff G and others had begun to perform in Europe and on festival stages across the United States, the NYPD removed them from local stages, citing public safety concerns.

Cobain had by then dived into drill beats, sparking some interest on SoundCloud, but it wasn’t until the pandemic’s forced isolation that he locked in with other New York artists looking to make the same kind of party music he was. “Everybody was in the crib and everybody was on Clubhouse,” said Chow Lee, a frequent collaborator who described entire days wasted hanging on the social audio app talking with Lonny Love, Payroll and other artists who are now staples of the current scene.

When restrictions began to lift, they’d throw underground parties to showcase the early sexy drill that they’d been posting to SoundCloud and YouTube. “You can’t really build a community around drill because you can’t be outside performing,” said Gabe P., the host of the internet rap show “On the Radar,” which first showcased Cobain and Chow Lee in 2021.

He added, “These parties felt like safe spaces where you could have fun. There’ll be girls there. The girls will be having fun, they feel safe and the artists feel safe. And I think they just created that environment.”

Cobain’s live shows extend the vibe. The sound system at the free show in Coney Island was shoddy, so the audience leaned in to fill in the lyrics of “Dunk Contest,” which describe various sexual acts Cobain wants to perform on girls mentioned by name. They reach a tittering pitch when Marni, his sometime girlfriend (“She’s my sweetheart. The Slizzy Princess”), waves as he sings, “I don’t think that I should talk ’bout Marni.” They repeat the dynamic two days later onstage at Terminal 5 for the New York stop of Ice Spice’s “Y2K” tour to a raucous crowd that half-sings, half-squeals in response.

Before that Coney Island performance, Cobain killed time over a plate of chicken tacos. Surrounded by a couple of burly bodyguards, they all test out the arcade punching bag game once the tacos are done, and fans who happen upon them will flutter about taking selfies and broadcasting on Instagram live as they join his walk to the makeshift stage. It’s a low-key flashback to the Union Square caravan and flies in the face of the concerns that had the police pulling his drill peers from stages just a few years earlier.

When Cobain is asked what it means to him to perform in his hometown, he raises his eyebrows above his black sunglasses.

“It means everything,” he said. “I just know that I’m not rapping about killing nobody. I don’t have nobody rapping about killing me, or at least I hope not. It feels amazing for real, because I know how New York can get.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.