Finding success too young has a way of freezing a person in place. In hip-hop—where the churn is constant and the lifespan of a sound can be shorter than a sentence—growing up is optional until it suddenly isn’t. MexikoDro, who quietly turned 30 last November, is no longer pretending the night lasts forever. The Atlanta producer, one of the principal architects of plugg—a vaporous offshoot of 2000s trap whose DNA now runs through artists like Playboi Carti—helped blueprint an era that pushed ATL from regional hotspot to international lodestar. His early work with ManMan Savage and his omnipresent tags made him something like a mythmaker. But mythologies age, and MexikoDro seems intent on letting his own deflate gently.
Still Goin the Ep, his first real effort as a solo rapper, feels like a conscious double-exposure: one frame capturing the blunt-force trap he grew up on, the other capturing a man pausing long enough to evaluate the debris. The production wears its antecedents proudly—you can hear The Recession’s icy horns, a constellation of Gucci Mane tapes, the stubborn 808s that once ruled Atlanta’s backstreets. As an emcee, MexikoDro delivers with the gravelly ease of someone who’s watched the cycles repeat: flashes of Big K.R.I.T.’s porch-light warmth, hints of Z-Ro’s weary pragmatism. What differentiates him is the stillness—his willingness to reject the dopamine economy of flexes and vices in favor of something resembling peace.
Across the EP, he references God frequently—not as an evangelist but as someone learning how to survive the quieter hours. Sometimes his spirituality skirts cliché, like aphorisms recited by someone still adjusting to the light. But moments of real clarity shine through: thanking God for the luxury of a shower on “Hurt,” or admitting that being home by 9 p.m. feels like a victory on “Remy.” On “Wish,” salad and shellfish become metaphors for sobriety’s slow pleasures. And on “Height,” he delivers the line that anchors the whole record: “I was down bad, rehab, I needed help… fucking with them pills, couldn’t do it by myself.” It’s disarming in its frankness—a reminder that Southern rap’s stoicism often obscures the tremors beneath.
That patience—to sit with a feeling rather than stuff it inside a punchline—extends to the project’s pacing. Instrumentals stretch their limbs for half a minute before MexikoDro’s ragged, nearly unmastered voice stumbles in. Tracks like BapeBrazy’s “No Date,” with its woozy synths, or the shadowy piano loops of “Marta,” resurrect the dirt-under-the-nails mixtape era, a time when Southern rap felt handmade, duct-taped, and alive.
What makes Still Goin the Ep quietly radical is how casually it rejects the chaos currently defining Atlanta rap: the legal sagas, the digital witch-hunts, the creep of online mythology. MexikoDro isn’t trying to reclaim a throne or fight for relevance. He’s documenting the unglamorous work of staying alive—routine, sobriety, quiet faith—without slipping into sermons or nostalgia cosplay. It’s the sound of someone aging out of the fantasy and finding, to his surprise, that real life has a rhythm worth keeping.
About the Author
