Album Review: Skeletor by Chief Keef
A man who built Drill’s blueprint at 16 is 30 now. Chief Keef made his most autobiographically detailed album. It’s the best thing he’s done in a mighty long time.
Drill’s most copied teenager turned 30 in August 2025, and he marked the occasion by not marking it at all. Keith Cozart, a lá Chief Keef, was 16 when “I Don’t Like” turned him into a regional phenomenon, 17 when Finally Rich dropped on Interscope, and 19 when Interscope dropped him and he started running 43B out of Los Angeles without asking for another deal. The people who traced over his early work (Lil Durk, King Von, Pop Smoke, every UK drill producer who borrowed the 808 patterns) have mostly either blown past him commercially or died. He put out one of his best works with Almighty So 2 in May 2024, announced publicly that he’d been clean from lean for several months, headlined Lyrical Lemonade’s Summer Smash in Chicago for his first hometown show in over a decade, and then went quiet.
Margaret Carter, his grandmother, the woman who raised him, the school bus driver who told the Chicago Sun-Times “Where’s this gang at? In my kitchen? In my refrigerator where he go all the time?”, died in March 2022. She is all over Skeletor. “Harry Potter” quotes her directly:
“Tie the bread up before it go stale.”
On “The Real Chief Keef,” she’s in two rooms at once. She caught him with his hands in the pot, caught him with his hands in the jar, and his mother would break your jaw if she caught you at it, too. On “Slide,” he gives her a full sentence: “Granny knew that I was smart because she hate dummies.” On “Only for the Night,” he’s talking to her directly: “Don’t worry ‘bout me, okay? I’m a soldier, I’ll be okay.” “Breaking Down” names the loss and compares the aftermath to postpartum. She took him to the dealership. She took him to the store and said, “Don’t ask for shit.” On “Harry Potter,” she found his gun and called him “a trip.” A 30-year-old is walking around with all of this memorized, and he put it on the record the way you’d repeat something Margaret Carter said at the kitchen table.
He stole fans from Walgreens, performed on his bed with no audience, and wore old pants on the first day of school. “Breaking Down” goes back to all of it, and a couple of verses later, there’s a hundred-thousand-dollar necklace with a cola charm. Inspired by Eminem, “The Real Chief Keef” has the Rolls-Royce as the pitch-black panther, and Chief Sosa broke, unable to cope, in the same verse, with no pause between them. “Harry Potter” puts it plainest:
“Ain’t get my GED, but I get every dollar.”
On “Video Shoot,” he admits he should’ve purchased real estate, but his dumb ass picked up a chain, then mentions that he paid for his cars in cash so they can’t get repossessed. “24Hrs” runs the number twenty-four against Kobe’s jersey, twenty-four Hermès bags, twenty-four shots for twenty-four cowards, the trap open twenty-four hours. All cash for the vehicles now—he used to walk to school as a kid with no shoes.
His baby son coos and babbles in the intro to “Only for the Night”—“Say dada”—and then everything else that’s true at the same time comes pouring out. Dropped out of school, knows nothing about GPAs, grew up around hustlers and hung around losers, plans to smoke dope until he’s 72. The lean doesn’t put him to sleep; it keeps him awake. She can come over, but only for the night. Court is in the morning. “Mark of Buddha” says his son doesn’t have to grow up in the hood, that kid is just like him. Three bars later, in Chicago, you can damn near not go outside with your son. On “Harry Potter,” an opp walked up on him and accused Keef of shooting at him. The response: “He wasn’t lying, I shot at him with my partner ‘nem.” On “Doja”:
“You’ll leave with a damn hole in your neck
Surgeons gon’ have to come open your neck.”
On “Mark of Buddha,” he mistakes the hype for an opp and opens fire on the hype. A few bars later, he’s beefing with a pint, not with people. On “The Real Chief Keef,” he concedes he has no business mixing Xans with the Wock’. Publicly sober from lean since mid-2024, he raps about all of it in the same verse and keeps moving.
G Herbo’s turn on “Slide” is the best guest contribution here. Three kids, a backyard that needs a water slide, a Glock under the pillow, “dropped the lo’ and his ass died.” Herbo matches Keef’s energy without mimicking his cadence. ian fills out “Video Shoot” fine, the ‘16 Westbrook bar funny and narrow enough, though he occupies more real estate than the song requires. “Shrek and Donkey,” produced by Murda Beatz (one of only two outside producers on the album, alongside Quadwoofer), finds Keef in a kush coma, his mother a GOAT the same way Kobe’s mother was, wondering out loud if he just saw Shrek and Donkey. “Talking Ish” runs long, Keef rambling through purchasing cars for Rosa and Harry, dodging court dates, fifty for a show and fifty for a feature while asking for neither, and Ballout’s spot adds volume without adding much beyond it. Chief Keef has been doing this for half his life. The grandmother material alone sets this apart from the rest of his catalog.
Great (★★★★☆)
Favorite Track(s): “Breaking Down,” “Harry Potter,” “Only for the Night”