Drill rapper G Herbo didn’t need to book Wintrust Arena for his 30th birthday party to demonstrate his status as one of Chicago hip-hop’s greatest exports. Herb’s stardom seemed assured from the beginning: His stunning 2014 debut, Welcome to Fazoland (released as Lil Herb), propelled him to notoriety with hardened performances and world-weary lyrics that let you feel along with him that nothing in life can be guaranteed. In the 2020s, he’s released a string of albums that hit the top ten of the Billboard 200 (the 2021 release 25 did best, reaching number five), but his course has seemed far from certain—in large part because in 2020 he was entangled in a headline-grabbing federal wire-fraud case. As Rolling Stone senior news editor Althea Legaspi detailed in a 2024 profile of He

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