I found this on youtube accidentally and thought it would be fun to analyze. Not my cup of tea, but definitely creative and different and was clearly received well on youtube. Overall a really strange production in my opinion, but there’s a lot to unpack.
The major sound design of this beat is a dark, possibly vox, sound that has been reversed. It is very eerie, but also rather full and takes up a wide range of frequencies. You can tell its impact when Adele’s vocals are added. Since it was remade, the creator extracted her vocals in as acapella, so some quality is lost. There is still good reverb on her voice to give it fullness and space, but you can tell it is more thin than normally, likely by strong EQing on the high and low end to make room for this new beat that isn’t normally with these vocals. Around the 40 second mark there is a vocal track added with Adele’s vocals pitched an octave down, contributing to the dark feel of the production. It sounds like a monster voice; the combination of that and a sustained bass starts to build energy in the track.
The characteristics of a drill beat typically consist of a syncopated hat pattern, different from the basic 1-2-3-4 meter in most pop music, it has almost a triplet feel. Drill snare patterns tend to be different as well, with the snare hitting on beats 3 and 8, instead of the orthodox 3-7 meter which keeps them completely symmetrical (4 beats in between each). Lastly the bass pattern is usually a deep sub bass, that has glides into higher registers towards the ends of each pattern. All of these standard drill characteristics are met in this production. The “Drill” style started as the main sound for a lot of UK rap, and integrated into American NY rap with rappers like Pop Smoke, Fivio, etc. When the beat drops, there is a loud distorted kick that takes precedent over the sub bass for the most part. The kick sounds off during Adele’s chorus in Hello. There is peaking of volumes and you can hear it in the distortion between the kick, vocals, drums; this is typical for youtube beats. This is why the beat almost feels more prominent than Adele’s award winning vocals, because that is the overall purpose of this production. For a producer to show off a beat that normally would never be anywhere close to Adele’s Hello, but made to work. Pretty odd, but creative, and props to whoever made it for being crazy enough to even think about blending the two genres.