What did you expect from this guy? Sportsmanship? Perspective? The kind of sober self-reflection that can only come from suffering humiliating defeat on the largest possible stage? No. Not this guy. It was never going to happen. That kind of thing would've directly contradicted the entire ethos of the Drake project. It's not that Aubrey Graham never discusses his own vulnerabilities. It's that he only ever does it on his own terms. He'll say that he loves women too much and that he feels hurt when they fuck other dudes in the apartments that he rents for them. He will not allow himself to consider the idea that the entire world laughed at him and danced on his grave. That's not what Drake does.
The long-running Drake project is layered and complicated enough that it can't be easily summed up, but I'll try to do it anyway. Basically, this charming middle-class ex-child actor pulled off the impossible. He emerged from the world of Canadian teenage soap operas, ingratiating himself with Lil Wayne's camp and emerging as a fresh-faced fully-formed post-Kanye superstar, a friendly and approachable type who could talk tough when the situation called for it but who really just wanted to discuss his feelings about strippers and Hooters waitresses. He was the right guy in the right place at the right time, and he became one of the greatest commercial titans in all of rap history. His music, once so springy and liquid and inventive, grew cold and distant and paranoid, as music from superstars almost always does. He became too big to fail, and he cruised on autopilot for years. Then, he got his ass beat by a guy who he didn't consider to be serious competition. Energy became hubris, and Drake had no idea how vulnerable he'd made himself.
At least on an artistic level, Kendrick Lamar did Drake a great favor. In the years before the Drake/Kendrick feud of 2024, Drake's music was stuck in purposeless torpor — an infinite-repeat cycle of half-interested mob talk and bad-faith complaints about anonymous situationships. It was so boring. When the tensions between camps finally boiled over and Kendrick Lamar turned a long cold war into a short hot one, Drake perked up. He seemed interested. His Kendrick diss tracks were full of unsubstantiated allegations and willful misreadings, and that was also true of Kendrick's songs about Drake. Drake sounded like he was having fun. Finally, he was alive! He could feel something! But he didn't count on Kendrick's biblical vitriol or on the ambient gathering backlash that was just waiting on a catalyst. Can't say it didn't surprise him. What did he miss?
For the past few years, Drake's public persona has been full sulk-mode. He and his old friend PARTYNEXTDOOR released their long-promised full-length collab $OME $EXY $ONGS 4 U as if everything was all good, and he even scored a genuine comeback hit by recapturing some of his sticky and careless "Hotline Bling" energy on "Nokia," but it didn't seem like much comfort to him. He hung out with manosphere streamer types and flogged sketchy online gambling concerns. He sent secret desultory messages via sartorial Instagram choices, and online sleuths scrambled to figure out what Drake was secretly saying. Drake spent a lot of time in Australia, as if living out the dreams of the kid in Alexander And The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day. And he plotted his return, the grand three-album onslaught that has effectively captured the internet's attention for the past few days.
As theatrical spectacle, Drake's Iceman rollout has been awfully effective. The giant melting ice sculpture in downtown Toronto was a pure publicity stunt, and it did what it was supposed to do. The sudden onslaught of music videos has been a lot better. Some of those clips are really cool! The prancing cowboys in "Plot Twist"? The ice-rink high-stepping in "Slap The City"? The bird's eye shots of bodies on the ground in "Whisper My Name"? Showmanship, baby! The one that really sticks with me is "Burning Bridges." It's a long Goodfellas-style tracking shots that takes us up through kitchens and staircases, into the fancy restaurant where Drake and his friends happily taunt the camera, doing their little peekaboo dance. They're all gathered there to celebrate... the fact that Rihanna didn't post A$AP Rocky's single on Instagram. It's a massively coordinated publicity campaign where nobody bothered to think about why anyone outside of Drake's immediate orbit would fucking care about any of this.
That's the purpose of Iceman. It's rancor. It's Drake asserting authority through sheer petty spite. And it's kind of working! Again and again on Iceman, Drake takes his little shots at Kendrick Lamar, the guy who danced on his grave: "Muggsy Bogues dunked for once, even I'm a bit amazed/ Yeah, someone give the kid a raise/ What is it, the braids?/ Even when I cut 'em, I could never fade." Allow me to be clear: This stuff does not work. The Kendrick feud is settled business, and even Drake seems to realize it. What really animates Drake now is the long list of people, some named and some implied, who joined the pile-on, or who didn't do enough to back him up, or who revealed that they think of themselves as something other than supporting players in Drake's personal saga of eternal glory.
Here's an incomplete list of Drake's targets on Iceman: A$AP Rocky, J. Cole, Jay-Z, DeMar DeRozan, LeBron James, Pharrell, Dr. Dre. The subject of Israeli genocide briefly surfaces, but it's just an excuse for Drake to hit DJ Khaled with a casual dome-shot, and I don't even know where Khaled fits into this grand tapestry. Drake also invokes one current manosphere buddy to take down another former rap buddy: "I was aidin' Ross with streams before Adin Ross had ever streamed." (I don't ever want to hear Adin Ross' name on a rap record, but that's pretty funny.) And that's just the people we know about. Drake devotes a long chunk of opening track "Make Them Cry" to someone who evidently pawned an OVO chain and then claimed it had been stolen. This really bothers Drake: "I could never forgive such a nefarious action." No slight is too tiny to escape Drake's attention, and the only former friend who he welcomes back into the fold is Future, unscathed as ever and airwalking breezily through "Ran To Atlanta," a song that functions as great spectacle and very good music.
That's the thing: Drake is rapping here. He has purpose and direction. The production credits for Iceman and the other two new albums are still obnoxiously blank on streaming metadata, but it's clear that Drake wrangled an elite team of producers and selected a set of stormy, twisty, beats that highlight his flow beautifully while allowing him to work in a range of different rap traditions. Drake has plenty of forced punchlines and goofy lyrical clangers on Iceman ("I do buy everything like I'm Middle Eastern"), but even those usually come in the context of twisty, extended runs that dig deep into individual rhyme schemes.
He's coming up with memorable songs, too. With "Janice STFU," Drake even makes an undeniable hit from a flipped, pitch-shifted Lykke Li hit — something that he last did back on So Far Gone. The motherfucking craft is there, and I regret to report that I respect it. (If any song from Iceman provokes another Kendrick response and reheats the feud, it'll be that one, just for the moment where Drake says, "White kids listen to you 'cause they feel some guilt, and that's how your soul gets fulfilled." He could've scored some points if he'd said that two years ago.)
Like every Drake album, Iceman is too long, too ugly, and too self-impressed. It gets boring and crawls up its own ass long before it ends. For the first time in a while, though, Drake has some spark. It's the ugliest kind of spark. It's grim and churlish and unfriendly. The vibes are terrible. Drake is only here to justify his own mistakes and to insist upon his own historic greatness, even amidst all the evidence piled up against him. He attempts to reframe his desperate lawsuit against his own record label as a campaign against "the Man." He's a bitchy gossip, a sore loser, and an oligarch who wants to paint himself as a man of the people. But for the first time in a long time, he brings enough energy to the proceedings that I'm remembered why this guy mattered in the first place.
Iceman is only one of three new Drake albums, but it's the obvious main event. Drake had some shit that he needed to get off his chest, and he knows that's what's going to get all the attention. In the hours before the album dropped, the world learned that it would be accompanied by two more, and people theorized that this was Drake trying to pull a Frank Ocean and get out of his Universal deal. Maybe, but it's easy to imagine other motivations. For one thing, the three-album drop is a show of dominance — Drake showing the sides of himself that his peers can't or won't bring to the table. I also think that he doesn't want to offset the pure hate of Iceman with any of the softer stuff that he brings to the table on the other two records.
Of the other two records, Maid Of Honour is by far the more interesting. That's Drake in horny club-music mode, a sharper and more propulsive version of the pivot that he tried to make on Honestly, Nevermind a few years ago. I'm still trying to figure out whether I think Maid Of Honour is a good album or if it's just a collection of sounds that I like — shivery electro bleeps, roller-disco bass-burps, new wave shimmers, Central Cee claiming that he's got a chopstick for your wonton. (I chuckle out loud at that stupid fucking line every single time.) At times, like the many drag-ball interjections, Maid Of Honour suggests a level of comfort with queerness that Drake has never approached before. Maybe that's just shallow positioning, but it's honestly interesting that Drake would even attempt to make his own Renaissance.
Maid Of Honour is something I didn't expect: a sign that some part of Drake still remembers how to have fun. Drake has flirted with dance music before, sometimes effectively and sometimes not. Here, though, he sounds like he's trying to make music that would've levitated the Mad Decent Block Party in 2013. The politics of sex and money are as fucked as ever, but this is Drake at least showing some indication that he enjoys having sex, as opposed to the bitter manipulations and resentments that always seem to come along with it when you're Drake. Some of the choices on Maid Of Honour, like the weird and ultra-processed goth guitar on closing track "Princess," suggest that Drake and his collaborators might actually still have some new ideas in them. I'll be curious to hear whether any of these tracks linger as party fuel after the provocations of Iceman fade away.
And then there's Habibti, the album where Drake goes into sensitive/whiney fake-patois R&B singer mode for what feels like forever, even if the album is barely half an hour long. Habibti has a few new moves in it, like the emo-country acoustic guitar reverie on opener "Rusty Intro." For the most part, though, this is the lowest-energy version of Drake, the one that outright refuses to hold my attention for longer than 45 seconds at a time. Almost every Drake album has long stretches that sound like Habibti, and this one is nothing but that. I'm grateful that this one exists as its own separate entity because I can comfortably ignore it. I don't even have to worry about skipping tracks when trying to enjoy a Drake album. I can just withhold my attention from the entire thing. I suffered through Habibti a few times while working on this review, and I doubt I'll ever put it on again after hitting publish. I'm already done with it.
Still, that means two of the three new Drake albums have at least some stuff going on. That's much better than I expected. That's a win. Drake is five months away from his 40th birthday. If he hasn't developed some bigger ideas about the world and his place in it by now, it's just never going to happen. Don't hold out hope. Failing that, he has managed to seize the zeitgeist and to make a blockbuster moment out of his own resentments and insecurities. Reports of his demise were greatly exaggerated. And if Drake refuses to accept his own humbling, at least he can find some inspiration for his imperiously surly bad-faith anthems from it. I wish we could expect something more than that from Drake, but we can't.
Iceman, Maid Of Honour, and Habibti are out now on OVO/Republic/UMG.
