Lil Durk signed his close friend and blood cousin Nuski to a deal just two days before Nuski was killed, a loss that left him with no time to celebrate and a grief he has carried ever since.
The Chicago rapper opened up about the tragedy while reflecting on the tattoos he wears in Nuski’s memory, describing him simply as a “blood cousin” who was killed in Chicago.
The timeline of events makes the loss particularly sharp. Durk had been in conversations about signing Nuski for roughly eight months before the deal was finalized.
When asked how they celebrated after the signing, Durk’s answer was brief and blunt. “We ain’t really even get a chance,” he said. “He got murdered. We ain’t even get a chance.”
When he heard the news, Durk described feeling “emotional as hell.” But he was clear that breaking down publicly was never an option, not for someone in his position. You can’t break down though,” he said, explaining that being seen as a leader meant others were watching him closely. “
A lot of people got their eyes on me. So, if I’m over here crying, I can’t have them looking like it.” He acknowledged, though, that in private the pain was real. Asked whether he cried in the early losses, he was direct: “Yeah, I cried every time.”
Nuski was not the only friend Durk lost. He estimated that somewhere between 20 and 30 people he considered genuine friends had been killed by violence, not acquaintances, but close friends.
The weight of that number, accumulated before he was even out of his early twenties, shaped much of his worldview and his music.
That worldview is reflected in the title of his mixtape, “Signs of the Streets,” which Durk said came from a simple truth about how he grew up. We would spend more time in the street than with our families,” he said.
The streets were not a backdrop to his life, they were the whole of it, and the project was his way of acknowledging that directly.
The mixtape, an 18-track project whittled down from more than 80 recorded songs, was positioned as his final release before his debut album.
Durk said the decision to drop another mixtape instead of going straight to an album came after internal debate and a surge in public attention that raised expectations.
Rather than rush an album, he chose to meet the moment with more music first. “I got confidence in myself so the next mixtape going to be A1,” he said.
The album, when it arrives, will be titled after his father’s name, Carl Wheeler. For Durk, the reasoning is personal and purposeful.
His father’s name carried weight in the streets, and he wants his own name to carry the same. “It got to live on,” he said, “like my daddy name in the streets.”
