Design by Tyler Farmer. Mello Buckzz, Iconic Savvy, RP Boo.
Boosted by Drake and Jacob Elordi, artists like Iconic Savvy and Mello Buckzz are pushing the sound forward.
June 15, 2026
Just days before Drake dropped his three-album pack of Iceman, Maid of Honour, and Habibti, 22-year-old Chicago rapper Iconic Savvy was still delivering DoorDash orders with her boyfriend. The artist was trying to make a little extra money when someone on the Canadian rapper’s team sent her a DM on Instagram. A Zoom call soon followed.
“I found out that I was going to be on his album that's dropping in two days,” she told me over our own Zoom call in late May. “But I didn't know that three other albums was dropping. I thought I was gonna be on Iceman.”
Savvy ended up on Maid of Honour, the dance-heavy LP that features "True Bestie," which samples Savvy's early 2025 song “PSA.” On "True Bestie," skittering drums ricochet beneath a menacing beat that borrows some of Jersey Club's bounce while remaining unmistakably rooted in Chicago juke music. Before Drake even begins rapping, Savvy's rapid-fire chorus cuts through the track, proudly declaring that no other girl can compare to her best friend. The record is playful, loud, impossible to sit still through, and acts as a celebration of friendship as much as a rap song.
In the weeks following the album's release, "True Bestie" emerged as a fan favorite across reaction channels and social media. Drake is known for platforming unknown talent, but focusing solely on him giving Iconic Savvy a global stage misses the larger shift happening underneath it. Before one of the biggest artists in the world came calling, Savvy was already building a name for herself in Chicago's steadfast juke scene.
Over the last year and a half, a growing wave of artists like Mello Buckzz, Lil M.U., Glizzy Glow, and Iconic Savvy have been bringing juke-influenced rap to increasingly larger audiences. Their songs move fast; the hi-hats crack like fireworks; and the music inevitably makes people dance, laugh, and yell lyrics at their friends.
If you've spent any time online recently, you've probably already encountered the movement in pieces. Mello Buckzz's "Move" became one of 2024's most infectious regional rap records before earning a Monaleo remix the following year. Glizzy Glow's "Cutwater" soundtracked a flood of videos of people attempting to sample as many flavors of the canned cocktail as possible. Then there was Lil M.U.'s "Top of Cars," a frenetic track that escaped Chicago entirely and found its way onto TikTok feeds across the world, eventually reaching actor Jacob Elordi after Sofia Coppola's daughter, Romy Mars, convinced him to film a dance video to the song. Individually, these moments might seem like internet curiosities. Taken together, they begin to look like evidence of a sound born in Chicago that is steadily finding new listeners far beyond the city limits.
While outsiders may be discovering juke through TikTok and Drake, the artists at the center of the movement say it’s the sound is a reflection of the city that raised them. "[Juke] is way deeper than just a song," Iconic Savvy said. "It's a feeling. It's the emotion. It's like home in a way."
Mello Buckzz sees the appeal in simpler terms. Juke music, she argues, does something a lot of contemporary rap struggles to do: command a room. "It's really the beat and the sound that originated from Chicago that speaks for itself," she said. "It demands a whole room. When you make music, you want to be able to play a song in the club and [have the] whole club dance."
Whether they realize it or not, many of the artists driving this moment are responding to the same frustration listeners have spent years voicing online. Rap has become increasingly aesthetic driven, often too optimized for mood rather than movement. Over the last decade, some of the genre’s most visible figures like Playboi Carti, Yeat, NBA Youngboy, and Destroy Lonely have leaned into dark world-building that’s taken over the charts, but hasn’t always been designed to get everyone out of their seats and onto a dancefloor.
"There's really no creativity in the rap game no more," Savvy said. "Everybody wants to be the same type of rapper." What she misses, she explained, is the sense of joy that once felt inseparable from the genre. "Rap has gotten too serious. It's supposed to be fun, it's supposed to be joyful."
To understand why the long-tail impact of juke rap is notable, it’s important to understand that neither juke nor footwork were ever meant to be consumed through a phone screen. Before TikTok dances, viral remixes, and Drake samples, the music lived in Chicago roller rinks, basement parties, school functions, and rec centers. It was music designed to be enjoyed at the community level.
"When people use the term now, they think they know what it means," said Kavain Wayne Space, the Chicago producer and DJ better known as RP Boo. "But to really understand it, you would've had to be in the room."
RP Boo would know. Widely regarded as one of the architects of footwork music, he traces the origins of juke back to Chicago's late-'90s dance culture, when DJs like DJ Thadz, DJ Clent, DJ Gant-Man, DJ Spinn, DJ Rashad, and DJ PJ were creating increasingly fast and energetic music for local dancers. At the time, juke and footwork weren't viewed as separate worlds. They were part of the same ecosystem, evolving alongside one another both as offshoots of ghetto house and ghetto techno music.
While outsiders often describe juke and footwork as subgenres, Chicagoans tend to talk about them as living community practices. The music and the movement are inseparable. Footwork dancers influenced the rhythms producers created. Producers built tracks around what dancers could do. One foot followed the other. "Footwork is the foundation of juke music," said Chicago DJ Icey Bby. "The music was created for footworkers originally."
DJ Icey Bby described a teenage social scene built around skating rinks and juke jams, where dancers packed floors and spent entire nights battling one another, moving their feet entirely too fast to awkward pockets in the music. "The dancing, the movement has so much to do with the production of the music," she said. "Without the footworkers, people would not have heard juke music."
Even today, many of the qualities that make juke music so instantly recognizable stem directly from those dance-floor origins. The songs move at blistering tempos, often between 160 and 170 beats per minute. Vocal samples repeat and stutter. Drum patterns shift wildly. For Archie O'Dell, the New York-based DJ known as DJ Fat Frog, that's part of what makes the genre so addictive and fun to play during his sets. The repetitive samples create what he describes as an "earworm" effect, while the relentless pace leaves little room for anything else but erratic dancing. "It's very hard to get out of your head," he said. “The crowd’s reaction is definitely positive. People like what they're hearing, but again, they don't exactly know what to do with their bodies just yet. It's like it's speaking to their mind in the right way, but their bodies have to catch up.”
That emphasis on movement also helps explain why the music has endured for decades. Chicago has given the world house music, blues, gospel, and drill. According to RP Boo, all of those traditions share a common thread. "It's all about the party," he said. "It's all about the energy…Juke is a culture," he concluded.
Chicago's dance music traditions have spent decades influencing sounds far beyond the city limits. House music became a global language. Drill transformed rap and spawned regional variations everywhere from New York to London. Footwork, meanwhile, found devoted audiences among heady electronic music fans thanks to figures like DJ Rashad, RP Boo, and the Teklife collective. For years, however, juke’s influence often traveled further than its name.
It has long held a devoted audience in underground dance scenes, but spend some time on YouTube and you’ll hear juke laced in DJ sets around the world centered on ghetto house, ghettotech, and hi-tech. Still, many listeners encounter fragments of the music without understanding its roots. Hits like Mello Buckzz’s “Move” are helping change that.
Released in 2024, the song wasn't confined to Chicago radio stations or local parties. It could immediately travel through TikTok and Instagram Reels before finding audiences hundreds of miles away. By the time Monaleo appeared on the remix the following year, the record had already developed a life beyond the Midwest. "It's just the era that we're in right now," Buckzz said. "We got TikTok, we got all these different platforms that just help people and the music spread beyond what we used to." Beyond social media, though, DJ Icey Bby says a shift in human behavior is playing a role in its popularity.
"I think people are just wanting to dance faster again," she said. "People want things to move faster in general—the way we take in media, the way we swipe through things quickly. The music is aligning with that."
For much of the streaming era, geography seemed to matter less and less, as internet-born scenes depended more on the tastes of artists than their birthplace. Yet over the last few years, regionality has become cool again. From Detroit rap's off-kilter punchlines to New Orleans bounce's renewed visibility to the growing popularity of Bay Area sounds, listeners have shown an increasing appetite for music that feels tied to a specific place. Juke rap fits squarely within that trend.
Nobody interviewed for this story seemed particularly worried about juke becoming more popular, but there was an underlying understanding that expanded reach can be a double-edged sword. Success often comes with distance, and the further a sound travels from its birthplace, the easier it becomes to separate it from the people who created it. Mello Buckzz and Iconic Savvy agree that the goal isn't to keep juke music locked inside city limits. If anything, they sounded excited that the rest of the world was finally catching on. But what they want is for Chicago to remain the center of its conversation.
While Savvy welcomes the newfound attention surrounding songs like "True Bestie," she sees the current moment as something larger than a single Drake placement or viral trend. "I feel like it's gonna go worldwide," she said. "I will be more than happy if other people hop on the wave and give Chicago that support. We spent so long in the back, for real, and not really being noticed for how great and how iconic our city really is…Juke music is timeless," she said. "It just needed a platform to be heard."