Torontonians flocked to the pile of ice blocks in a downtown parking lot, a stunt to promote Drake’s forthcoming album Iceman.Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail
Drake has spent the past 20 years reframing how the world sees Toronto. The genre-blending musician’s latest mark on the city is a physical one: an ice-block monolith two blocks from its central square, spanning nearly nine metres across and four metres high.
Crowds have flocked to the parking-lot ice pile. Some visitors have tried to destroy it with fire. Many hoped to unearth the mystery inside. On social media, Drake said that somewhere in the ice is the release date for his upcoming album Iceman. Late Tuesday, after the streamer Kishka said he had found the ice’s hidden treasure, Drake confirmed the album will be released May 15.
The stunt fits well into the grandeur of music history. The pile has parallels to the massive wall that ex-Pink Floyd member Roger Waters has toured with when performing that band’s album The Wall; it is almost as imposing, and certainly more frigid. Album rollouts have become far more complex since that album’s 1979 release, with teased-out mysteries becoming the norm.
Drake himself mounted a multimonth campaign a decade ago for his album Views, replete with billboard ads and endless rumours that the record might be released on April 16 of that year – the 16th day of the fourth month, drawing keen listeners’ minds to the Toronto area code 416.
Mystery solved or not, the Iceman stunt has succeeded in setting off a social-media firestorm, whipping 39-year-old Drake back into the zeitgeist as he prepares to launch his first solo record since the escalation of his long-simmering feud with American rapper Kendrick Lamar.
While Drake spent the 2010s as a leading figure in pop music’s reorientation toward hip hop, Mr. Lamar has emerged as a generational rap talent, winning a Pulitzer Prize and 27 Grammy Awards – including for Not Like Us, the Drake diss track that shot around the world in 2024.
As much as Drake has revelled in his fame, his raps have long revelled in paranoia. Sculpting his persona into the Iceman could be a metaphorical sign of those impulses deepening. Yet the physical ice pile his team erected this week has had the effect of drawing people closer to his orbit – or at least to his pile of hundreds of ice blocks. Thousands of people from across the Greater Toronto Area have come to gawk at its absurdity: It is at once a stunt, album promotion and public-art installation.
By Monday night, people had begun to climb the slippery structure, attacking it with pickaxes and trying to melt it with homespun blowtorches and charcoal-briquette fires. Security wound up erecting a fence around the pile for a while, but eventually let crowds return to the ice by Tuesday at noon.
Mawg Design is the experiential marketing company behind the publicity stunt.Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail
How quickly could the Bond Street parking lot be free of Drake’s icy grasp? The Globe and Mail brought a measuring tape with increments of both inches and centimetres to the 16-block-high pile Tuesday. Each one is about 10 inches tall, 40 inches wide and 20 inches deep – the standard size for ice-sculpting blocks.
Dimensions in hand, The Globe contacted one of Canada’s leading ice researchers, whose office is just a few blocks away at Toronto Metropolitan University. In between watching students defend their chemistry theses, Stefania Impellizzeri, the Jet Ice Research Chair in Sustainable Materials Chemistry, said by e-mail that the structure could take between 10 days and two weeks to melt.
The way the structure is built, she said, was key to the way the solid ice will melt into liquid. “By using individual blocks, the total surface area includes the faces of every single block – more exposed surface area, more edges and corners, more gaps for warmer air, and the water from the top layers will seep into the seams.”
Melting will not be consistent over time, Prof. Impellizzeri added, especially given shifting weather. Sunlight is key to melting, but so is rain, which is forecast for next Saturday. And there’s also the “fan factor,” she added: The physical interventions of human beings chipping into and bringing flames toward the ice pile will also play a role. (Among the crowds of photo-taking onlookers Tuesday, one young man repeatedly tried to roundhouse-kick the pile.)
The origin of the ice, meanwhile, became a source of debate throughout the crowd. One rumour that rippled from the east end of the parking lot to the west was that it had been brought directly from the Scotiabank Arena in an attempt to break “the curse” – though it was unclear if it was Drake’s curse, or the decades-long rout of the Toronto Maple Leafs. In an attempt to clarify this, The Globe contacted the arena’s owner, Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment. “Fun theory, but not accurate,” said David Haggith, the organization’s senior vice-president of communications.
Some people took to the ice blocks with pickaxes and even fire.Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail
So The Globe then got in touch with Mawg Design, the experiential marketing company that created the ice pile. Its owner, Michael Gingerich, said in an interview that Mawg tried sourcing every ice-sculpture block it could find in Canada – totalling about a million pounds, or more than 453,000 kilograms, largely from a company called Iceculture in Hensall, Ont.
The project moved quickly, coming together over the course of about 10 days, with installation of 22 transport trucks’ worth of ice taking about 24 hours starting last Sunday. “Timeliness is important when ice is melting,” Mr. Gingerich said.
Though the release-date mystery has been solved, there are parallels between the sheer attention the ice pile has gotten and that of a piece of public art. If someone had a private arena where they wanted to house this work – or perhaps a replica – they might want to know how much it would be worth on the art market.
But Miriam Shiell, a private art dealer in Toronto who specializes in 20th-century modern and contemporary art, has doubts about that. “I just feel it’s a pile of ice,” she said in an e-mail. “So that’s my two cents worth – the whole thing isn’t worth more than that.”