With any solo, you want to tell a story. The licks, riffs and grooves are your words. Writers structure stories as narrative arcs.
A narrative arc is usually:
- Exposition: The introduction the story in which characters are introduced, setting is revealed.
- Rising Action: A series of events that complicate matters for the protagonist, creating a rise in the story's suspense or tension.
- Climax: The point of greatest tension in the story and the turning point in the narrative arc from rising action to falling action.
- Falling Action (Anti-climax): After the climax, the unfolding of events in a story's plot and the release of tension leading toward the resolution.
- Resolution: The end of the story, typically, in which the problems of the story and of the protagonists are resolved.
In good stories there's usually a series of rising actions (and slight falling actions) that gradually get bigger to the big climax and the resolution of the story.
So a (longer) drum story might go like this:
(Bonus points to nerds who noticed that this drum solo is in sonata form.)
The conflict in the rising actions are usually described musicians as "tension and release" and the tension can be anything that is unsettled: busy vs. sparse, funky vs. straight, quiet vs. loud, toms vs cymbals, playing behind the beat or in front of the beat, slow vs. fast, etc.
If you listen to this Simon Phillips solo you'll see he's all about narrative arc. And he'll also use rests or playing behind or against the beat to increase tension.