Drake performs at Toronto's Scotiabank Arena last October.Sammy Kogan/The Canadian Press
Apparently, it’s Drake’s World and we’re all just living in it. Whether you love or loathe Drake, there’s one thing you can’t deny: He knows how to get people talking. It’s not often that you see everyone from teens and twentysomethings to Gen Xers and Baby Boomers playing a months-long music industry rendition of Where’s Waldo, desperately seeking out clues as to what Drake’s next move will be.
Drake’s Iceman album rollout featured a plethora of publicity stunts that had everyone guessing, from staging iced-out CN Tower takeovers, hosting livestreams and presenting pyrotechnics explosions in North York and down by Lake Ontario to dumping giant blocks of ice on Bond Street in downtown Toronto to uncover album release dates and leaving his Toronto Raptors courtside seats empty in favour of fake blocks of ice. Someone in the OVO C-suites should consider giving Drake’s marketing team pay raises (or stock options in OVO).
The pink diamond-encrusted elephant in the room here is that the attention paid to Drake’s most recent music-biz machinations hints at post-Kendrick Lamar drama withdrawal symptoms, in preparation for the release of Drake’s ninth solo studio album, after he was so thoroughly thrashed by his rap arch nemesis from Compton back in 2024.
Most curious onlookers and Drakephiles have been anxiously awaiting what should have been his redemption album. What they got instead was something far more intriguing, if not outright enigmatic.
Drake on Friday morning released three separate albums (Iceman, Maid of Honour, Habibti), containing 43 songs in total, and no one knows why, especially given Gen Z’s collective predilection for consuming short easily digestible bits of art and music. Never mind triple albums – even releasing double albums in hip-hop is risky, unless you are releasing music with sky-high artistic integrity, like the late Notorious B.I.G did when he released what ended up becoming the posthumous Life After Death, or even Tupac Shakur’s All Eyez On Me, which was equally stellar.
Canadian rapper Drake lit up Toronto’s CN Tower on Thursday, May 14th in an icy blue display before releasing his new album "Iceman."
What we got with Drake’s trilogy – which is very clearly and by most objective accounts not Drake’s best work – is all kinds of unsubstantiated but very real-sounding theories tied to Drake releasing three albums at one time. Was it, for instance, to fulfill his contractual obligations with his record label, Universal Music Group, who he recently tried to sue for being an accessory to Kendrick’s Not Like Us upsurge, and for whose president, Lucian Grainge, Drake reportedly has a level of disdain?
Even more confounding is the fact that there’s no real cohesive or thematic link between the three albums. That being said, all three albums having a different theme, sound and vibe is a good thing, if you’re into sonic diversity.
Publicity stunts notwithstanding, we still want to hear another great album from Drake, as the last truly great one, Views, came out 10 years ago. Was it worth the wait?
Let’s start with the good. The Iceman album cover features a shiny sequined Michael Jackson glove. On the surface, that reference point makes sense, given that Drake and Michael stand as two of this planet’s most transformative artists. But MJ had producer Quincy Jones, one of the most accomplished music maestros of all time, by his side, which meant there’d be a certain expected degree of quality control.
Iceman is the best album of the lot, and on the intro track Make Them Cry where the beat production switches up mid-song – a recurring theme throughout the album – we get the Old (good) Drake, and a bird’s-eye view into the inner workings of his songwriting prowess, as he seamlessly references everything from the reality of being raised by a single mother, getting older and how visits to his hot therapist leave him distracted to the stark reality of his father fighting cancer.
On the scene at Drake’s ice-block monolith as fans try to melt away the mystery
Thinly veiled disses toward Kendrick Lamar show up throughout the album, and Ran to Atlanta counterpunches Lamar’s Not Like Us assertion that Drake’s relationship with Atlanta’s A-list artists is superficial by enlisting that city’s rap icon Future, who delivers a great feature appearance. Make Them Pay, where Drake samples and interpolates Deniece Williams’ earthly Free over some smooth piano stabs, reminds us why Drake is Drake, as he spits sharp effortless bars over Ovrkast’s production, while taking pot shots at faded allies in his ecosystem, including J Cole and DJ Khaled.
What Did I Miss?, a previously released song that served as a reminder that Drake had not abandoned the rap game despite some public perception, appears on Iceman. Drake is one of the better writers in the contemporary rap game, and here, you get that in bushels. Still, there are some incredibly awkward moments – such as whenever he attempts to rap in Jamaican patois or references cringeworthy requests for fellatio on the R&B-fuelled Shabang, or when he asserts on Little Birdie, a dance-track diss-track to an ex, how “all these Arab women treat me like the Prince of Persia.”
Certainly, the diversity of sounds featured on here is noteworthy, as the album shifts from the bouncy synthesizers and catchy autotune hooks on the standout Janice STFU to the ’80s freestyle dance track 2 Hard for The Radio. The album stands on its own, and doesn’t necessarily benefit from lazy features, such as 21 Savage on B’s on The Table. And it just wouldn’t be a classic Drake record without the pettiness that appears in abundance: On Burning Bridges, one could assume he’s dissing his ex Rihanna’s current partner A$AP Rocky when he raps “your baby momma didn’t even post your single.”
Things go downhill from there with the largely forgettable Habibti album, where Drake takes on his emo singing R&B persona.
Most of the tracks on here are slow- to mid-tempo, including modern day slow jams – not Drake’s strong suit – such as Classic and White Bone, and some pretty sappy love songs thrown in the mix (Slap The, Hurr Nor Thurr) that reference his apparent current singledom. The sheer number of tracks on this album that sound like throwaway studio outtakes solidifies the theory that Drake just wants to free himself from the clutches of UMG’s Grainge.
Fans of Drake gather near the CN Tower on Thursday night for a video projection promoting the release of Iceman.Arlyn McAdorey/The Canadian Press
And while Drake may be known for the sunnier disposition he lends to initiatives that show his love of his hometown, from his work with the Raptors as their global ambassador to his OVO Festival, he’s also always had a dark side. That’s where the third album, Maid of Honour, comes in.
The tracklist here is almost singularly fixated on his playboy persona, mixed in with soon-to-be strip club anthems, much of it laid out over retro ’80s dance club music inspirations. Drake’s OVO stable and friendship group features a fair number of men of Jamaican descent, and he lets rip his inner Jamaican on more than a few tracks, including Amazing Stage with its plainly stated dancehall music vibes, and New Bestie, where Drake serenades an unknown hottie in his best Jamaican patois. If ’80s-influenced dance music is not your thing, you might be hitting skip.
Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee and rapper André 3000 once opined that, as an aging rapper, he would struggle to find authentic topics to rap about, half-joking that his daily life consists of mundane tasks such as needing a colonoscopy. With Drake pushing 40 in October, you get a sense that he could conceivably be struggling to find new subject matter to rhyme about, too, outside of the predictable commercial rap clichés tied to materialism, fast cars and women.
Are his 15 minutes of fame nearing the 14-minute mark? Perhaps. But betting against the 6 God would not be a wise thing to do, given that, even with minimal artistic output, he was the biggest streaming artist in Canada in 2025, and will conceivably be the biggest streaming artist in Canada this year, all things considered.
That being said, if you’re looking for quality over quantity, this trilogy ain’t it. Extracting the best songs from these three albums and placing them on a singular album might have been just the thing that the rap doctor ordered, and would work as the perfect foil and redemption move, in the face of the big bad American rapper Kendrick Lamar. In the end, this was a wasted opportunity to reclaim the rap throne.