I’ve been a fan of Cash Cobain, the Queens-based rapper and producer, since the moment I heard him. Since the moment he oozed into earshot is more like it: Sonically and spiritually, Cash is all about lubricious flow. His beats come glazed in synths and dripping with reverb. He raps about sex, and only sex, in rhymes that savor the sticky particulars, an effect that’s enhanced by the rapper’s slurred singsong delivery. It sounds as if Cash has recorded his music while marinating in something viscous, like a hot tub full of K-Y. Slizzy, the adjective that pops up constantly in his songs and social media posts—rough translation: of or relating to a libertine lifestyle—nicely captures the vibe: sleazy, slithery, and, forgive me, jizz are lurking in those two syllables. The track that first caught my notice was 2023’s “Not No Xanax 2,” with its cheeky sample from Nelly’s “Dilemma.” The lyrics showcase Cash’s signature blend of raunchy and droll: “I want your pussy/ It’s not a dilemma.”

In recent months, slizzyness has been spreading across hip-hop, oil slick–style. Cash’s atmospheric, idiosyncratic production has found favor with an impressive array of MCs: Lil Yachty, Pink Pantheress, Central Cee, Trippie Redd, Fivio Foreign, Don Toliver, Big Sean, J. Cole, and such up-and-coming New York rappers as Chow Lee and Bay Swag, confederates in the city’s burgeoning “sexy drill” movement, which Cash Cobain founded more or less by himself. Then there’s Drake, who made canny use of a Cash beat on his 2023 Top 5 hit “Calling For You.” To many listeners, Drake seemed to be aping Cash’s cadences in the song, a theory that gained credence when a purported “Calling For You” reference track surfaced online. Cash’s music had been circulating in the hip-hop underground for just a few years, on self-released singles and mixtapes. But already, the biggest rapper on the planet was audibly in his debt.

In August, Cash dropped his debut studio album, Play Cash Cobain, a title that’s also a Siri command. It is one of the year’s most satisfying releases in any genre. It’s a kind of theme album, a slizzy manifesto—a conceptual triumph as cogent as The Dark Side of the Moon or, more to the point, Let’s Get It On. The album has generated the viral hits “Dunk Contest” and “Rump Punch,” hilariously ardent songs about cunnilingus and other activities for which no polite term exists, Latin or otherwise. Another single, “Fisherrr” (pronounced “for sure”), percolated up to various Billboard charts, spawning a remix with drill’s crossover star, Ice Spice, whose North American tour Cash joined as an opening act.

But the cult of Cash is not measurable by the usual metrics, by chart positions or streaming stats. He thrives in the realm of virality and vibes. His star power is marked by the rise of the “Reemski,” a dance craze popularized by “Fisherrr.” You can glimpse his growing influence in countless TikTok videos, hashtagged #slizzy, of city kids dancing and debauching, testaments to Cash’s status as a figurehead—the benevolent host of a big virtual bacchanal.

Not just virtual, though. Back in April, when a scheduled “Slizzyfest” show at Manhattan’s Irving Plaza was shut down by police, concertgoers paraded alongside Cash to Union Square, where they rapped with the star as his records were blasted on portable speakers. It was one of those thrilling moments when a subcultural scene bursts into public view. Onlookers that night might have been puzzled by the spectacle. A short, stout man was leading a throng in a sing-along of pornographic songs, enunciated in staccato rhyme-bursts, over a weirdly gentle soundtrack—beats that didn’t roar but wafted and chimed and shivered. Every now and then, a hip-hop newcomer materializes with a style that renders established sounds and stars instantly old-fashioned. In 2024 that innovator was Cash Cobain.

Those who doubt his power to shift paradigms need only consider how oxymoronic the phrase sexy drill sounded a short time ago. In the decade-plus since drill emerged in Chicago and began its global migration—taking root first in London, then Brooklyn, then more or less everywhere else—it has been a music of menace and dread, with bruising beats and nihilistic lyrics that focus relentlessly on violence, guns, and gangs. The great Brooklyn rapper Pop Smoke, who was shot dead in February 2020, managed to drag drill into the Top 40, a testament to his charisma and, perhaps, to timing: Pop Smoke’s 2020–21 chart run coincided with the upheavals of the COVID pandemic and the Black Lives Matter uprising, a moment when drill’s boom and gloom caught the mood of a world in turmoil.

Around the same time, New York producers began to experiment, jettisoning the brooding beats imported from U.K. drill—the rumbling bass lines and minor-key synth melodies, derivative of grime and garage—for more local and, in a way, livelier sounds. They mixed in grooves and drum patterns borrowed from Jersey club music and went wild with samples of familiar rap and R&B songs. So-called sample drill was another pandemic phenomenon, born under lockdown in the bedrooms of young New Yorkers who had time on their hands, music-making software, and a desire to freshen up a genre that had grown stale. Cash Cobain, who began his life in the Bronx before moving to Queens, was the most gifted of these tyros. Messing around with music was second nature to him. As a child, he’d spent countless hours teasing melodies out of electronic toys. Later, he taught himself to make beats using a pirated version of the digital audio workstation FL Studio, a tool he uses to this day.

Sample drill was often crudely made; many producers lifted beats wholesale from YouTube and airdropped in unimaginative samples. Cash’s stuff sounded different. (His producer tag—“And this beat from Cash, not from YouTube”—minces no words about the distinction.) His skills were on display in tracks like Shawny Binladen’s “Georgia” and B-Lovee’s “My Everything,” both from 2021, which carved loops from famous songs (by Ray Charles and Mary J. Blige, respectively) into nifty arrangements full of telling details: a sour string-orchestra snippet that rears up in the silence between bass thumps; a triangle, panned hard to the left channel, ringing out repeatedly, as if tallying a record score on a pinball machine.

In the years since, Cash’s production has gotten weirder and more meticulous. He specializes in a kind of sneaky psychedelia, songs that move in unexpected ways, slinking and sighing and twitching. He can be stingy with drums, withholding the beat for bar after bar, delivering drops in unlikely spots, then silencing the drums again, for good. He lands loops on odd accents and daubs in synths and autotune with painterly precision. He inclines toward mellow, but occasionally his songs detonate. Some of the most shamelessly bombastic and opulent music I heard this year is in Cash productions like Lancey Foux’s “Daylight” and his own “Me n Payroll,” shuddering, thundering records that sound as if they’re designed to be blasted heavenward from a DJ booth atop Everest.

But Cash’s greatest genre disruption is in the area of subject matter. In his hands, drill has transmogrified into the horniest music in a pop landscape that is more sex-saturated than ever before. What separates Cash from pop’s and hip-hop’s countless dirty talkers is zeal, the combination of kinkiness and conviction that distinguishes higher-order hedonists—those who are “real slizzy, too slizzy, too sexy”—from mere workaday pervs.

He raps constantly about performing oral sex, an activity he likens to consuming, variously, lunch, dinner, potatoes, macaroni, salmon, Danish pastry, rum punch, Mountain Dew, Skittles, and “a 10-piece” (of chicken tenders, presumably). He sees no difference between romance and sex, cooing courtly sentiments (“You’re so beautiful when I look you in your еyes”) and lewd ones (“She ride the dick with no hands like a circus bike”) in the same rhapsodic tones. The effect is enhanced by the velocity of the songs, the rate at which Cash pours forth his come-ons and turn-ons, like a man determined to state his credentials but eager to move on to pressing business in the boudoir. In “Fisherrr,” the lyrics somersault at the listener in a barrage of rhymes, half-rhymes, and syllables drawled and distended into kinda-sorta rhymes: attitude, mad at you, tatted too, having you, avenue, savage too, cabbage too, compatible, badder boo, master room, nasty too, animal, Hannibal, act a fool, active too, edible, Adderall—etc., on down to “It feels like it’s grabbing you,” a paean to a feature of the female anatomy (take a wild guess which).

The politics of Cash’s stylistic swerves are interesting to contemplate. In recent times, New York drill has grown ever more virulent, with a new vanguard of rappers, largely from the Bronx, rasping and barking their way through songs that litigate (and sometimes incite) the turf wars of the city’s gangs. Against this backdrop, Cash’s music looks less like a new species of drill than a drill spoof. The way he repurposes the genre’s antic stop-start cadences to rap in dulcet tones about fucking—it lands like a joke at the expense of drill’s macho hotheads. Why are you grunting about guns and “opps,” he seems to be saying, when you could be spending quality time with Shanti and Zari and Jada and China and Niya and Marni?

In short, Cash’s pivot from violence to sex, and his embrace of smooth sounds, is a pop move. Like Ice Spice, he’s got his eyes on the mainstream. Which is not to suggest that Cash is a drill gentrifier. The milieu we glimpse in his songs and videos—scenes of courtship and consummation set in outer-borough streets and bodegas and bedrooms—is matter-of-factly working-class: the world of Black and Brown New York neighborhood kids, sexy and urbane but unglamorous. Cash brags endlessly about getting laid, not getting rich; the accoutrements that pop up in his songs aren’t fancy cars or designer clothes but mobile phones, tools that mediate the hookups. (“What’s your Insta? What’s your number?/ What’s your Finsta? And your TikTok?” Cash demands in “Slizzy Dialogue,” from 2023, a duet of sorts in which Cash takes both speaking parts.) The pundits who fret about a Gen Z “sex recession” should cock an ear, as it were, to Play Cash Cobain.

Cash’s sexual politics are also interesting. It’s perhaps a stretch to call him a feminist. But unlike so many other priapic rappers, he doesn’t comes off as egotistical or predatory. He’s a kind of revivalist: a Love Man, a Casanova of the old school. His true model isn’t fellow rappers, or even the ’90s and ’00s R&B Don Juans whose records he samples (H-Town, Tyrese, Ne-Yo), but an amply proportioned sensualist of an earlier era, Barry White, whose big, brash songs conveyed pure awe at the beauty of women and the magnitude of his own appetites. Like White, Cash’s attention to Her Pleasure is noteworthy: “I wanna please your mind, your spine, your spirit, your body too.” As for His Pleasure: The old saw about the brain being the biggest sex organ applies. Slizzy is an idea, an ideal; Cash is the thinking man’s horndog. The most fervent moment on Play Cash Cobain, the vaguely Latin house–flavored “Luv It,” has a refrain that recognizes no mind-body problem—no dilemma, so to speak, between pussy in theory and pussy in fact. Quoth Cash: “Need you right now in my head/ Need you right now in my bed.”