“Iceman” has arrived, and then some.
After spending the better part of a year teasing his first solo album since 2023 — and his first, more importantly, since losing the epic rap battle that culminated with Kendrick Lamar's “Not Like Us” — Drake finally dropped “Iceman” on Thursday night alongside two other albums whose existence took much of the world by surprise: “Maid of Honor” and “Habibti”.
Together, the three LPs comprise 43 new songs from the Toronto-born rapper and singer who has been searching for a way back to the pop cultural position he occupied for much of the 2010s. To gauge his progress, The Times' Mikael Wood and August Brown did some preliminary listening and then exchanged some ideas.
MIKAEL WOOD: Well, August, to paraphrase the most psychotic song from the Kendrick/Drake conflict: Meet the many Grahams. Early signs suggested that “Iceman” would constitute a return to Drake's tough attitude following his humiliating defeat, and indeed that's largely what the album delivers through lush yet hard-hitting beats.
However, with “Maid of Honor” and “Habibti,” Aubrey Graham, 39, is also showing off her other dominant modes: world-traveling dance music hedonist (in the former) and callous R&B lover (in the latter). Clearly, the sheer volume and breadth of the music here is intended to serve as a kind of shock-and-awe campaign designed to return us to a time when Drake seemed to rule not just hip-hop but all of pop music. (Don't forget that 2018's “Scorpion” contained 25 tracks.)
What do you think of their oversized effort here? Does it speak of an overflow of creativity or an inability to edit? We should say that Drake's guests on the albums include 21 Savage, Central Cee, Sexyy Red, Popcaan and Future, the latter of whom appears on “Iceman” on a song called “Ran to Atlanta,” a clear callback to Kendrick's line in “Not Like Us,” where he accuses Drake of running to the southern rap capital every time he needs some street cred.
I can see that song finding its place on rap radio along with – hey, what do you know? – “2 Hard 4 the Radio”, which seems like a Drake classic in the style of “In My Feelings” or “Nice for What”. I was also first struck by the albums “Cheetah Print,” a frisky strip club, and “Goose and the Juice,” which sounds like… MGMT? I don't know, man.
Drake performs on stage during “Lil Baby & Friends Birthday Celebration Concert” at State Farm Arena on December 9, 2022 in Atlanta.
(Prince Williams/WireImage)
AUGUST BROWN: Drake's task at this juncture is interesting and unprecedented: How does a generational superstar return to the most complete “Ether” in modern music history? Going from being the defining artist of the 2010s to waging a scorched earth war with your own label and hanging out with, ugh, Adin Ross on his live stream?
His low-stakes collaborative album with Partynextdoor last year suggested he might just lick his wounds and leave it behind. But this new music is neither a harsh response nor a departure from the worst years of his career. He's a guy who's still thinking about his next moves and decides to make them all at once.
Like you said, Mikael, the cheating-stained “Ran to Atlanta” shows that he at least has a sense of humor about the whole debacle, reuniting with Future to do exactly what Kendrick accused him of. (Hey, the tactic works for a reason: because it sounds cool.) “2 Hard 4 the Radio” is the title of a really fun song for Drake, and it's got some upbeat West Coast funk to boot. I agree that if there's any hit to be found amidst this barrage of music, it's those two, and perhaps the album's first single, “What Did I Miss,” is gigantic, churning, and triumphant enough to prove that Drake is still impervious.
However, the problem remains the background radiation of the entire project, and there is almost… almost — somewhat sympathetic when he raps on “Make Them Pay” that “I need praise 'cause lately it's just fights and disagreements / The industry is really evil / And I faced the way they paint me, but it hurts just like the Philly Eagles.” Drake is a rococo master of self-pity, but damned if he doesn't have a real reason for it this time. (That said, after “Not Like Us,” maybe I wouldn't use my comeback album cover to put on a bright white glove and allude to music's most infamous alleged child molester?)
About the rest: “Maid of Honor” recalls their failed but intriguing deep house experiment, 2022’s “Honestly, Nevermind,” but replaces that LP’s raver haze with bass, footwork, and Miami ghettotech. You probably think this is in the smut lineage of Dance Mania records, but you're not that committed to the topic. “Road Trips” and “Cheetah Print” have a fun Nina Sky bounce, and “Outside Tweaking” and “True Bestie” take cool, tough production turns. But if this is supposed to be his horny devil dancefloor album, he's still limply calling to tell us about his issues with Onlyfans models. How did you get such a quiet performance from Sexyy Red, precisely? If someone snuck up on me in the club and whispered, “He should be cremated,” like Drake does on “BBW,” I'd reach for my bear spray.
He fares best on “Habibti,” which feels like it collects all the extraneous detritus of this cycle, but ends up being the most interesting to follow. “WNBA” evokes that dizzy, panoramic period of “Take Care” and “Views”; “White Bone” is restless, unstructured and bursting with texture, while the moody guitars of “Fortworth” feel like they're calling from within Bieber's “Swag” universe. “Slap the City” resonates and lulls with R&B falsetto and at least makes the empty nihilism of Drake’s love life feel self-aware. This is the least intentional of this trio of silly spray-and-pray LPs, but perhaps the most ambitious and layered.
MIKAEL WOOD: So what do we think this Temu album release will do for Drake's career? As you noted in August, the cover of “Iceman” unmistakably evokes Michael Jackson, an icon of success (and, uh, other things) whom Drake has repeatedly used as a benchmark to measure his own impact. Billboard reports that Jackson is the only artist to have held the top three spots on its album chart simultaneously. Given the hype over Drake on the Internet Thursday night, it doesn't seem impossible that he could match that feat after a week of massive streaming activity (although the amiable Noah Kahan, interestingly, might be the one who ends up thwarting him).
At times over the past two years, Drake seems to have been projecting the idea that he no longer cares about playing the pop hit game; You can see his embarrassing manospheric flirtation as his attempt to get around the old gatekeepers and connect directly with a small (albeit deeply passionate) portion of his fanbase. But Drake's goal has always been hits: his ability to read culture and channel what he finds into songs that become almost oppressively ubiquitous.
With only a few exceptions – “2 Hard 4 the Radio” really seems inevitable – I'm not sure I hear that spirit in this material, either because Drake can't access it anymore or because he doesn't care. However, he also doesn't seem to be in his innovator bag, trying things to take pop to a new place, like he's done so many times before.
Drake performs at State Farm Arena on December 9, 2022 in Atlanta.
(Paul R. Giunta / Invision / AP)
AUGUST BROWN: I would absolutely laugh if Noah Kahan denied him the Jackson-equivalent chart feat he's so transparently trying to achieve with this triptych. Social media was filled with rumors that both Spotify and Apple Music suffered widespread outages last night after their launch. But I wouldn't put it past him to be up to some Chaotic Good-type ruse spreading the rumor that he's bigger than the streaming infrastructure. (Ya, the most striking line of “Make Them Cry” – “My dad has cancer right now, we're fighting stages / Believe me when I say there's a lot of things I'd rather face” – may have been overdone.)
This trio of LPs will be a huge hit, no doubt. At a time when rap seems to have lost its place on the Hot 100, this is sure to score some top spots and reaffirm that Drake has a huge, committed fan base that will stick with him in perpetuity. Not to compare a Jewish artist to a once-notorious Hitler admirer, but there are echoes of the Ye model here, in that villain arc that Drake is now isolated from pop and hip-hop music (both culture and industry) when he used to define it. Now he's more or less a top-tier Twitch streamer with million-dollar beats.
With these LPs, he's delivering full-throttle fan service, but I don't see anyone outside of Aubrey's sphere remembering much about these records a year from now, while people will be singing “Luther” and mocking “Wop wop wop wop wop” until the sun explodes.
If Drake truly sees himself as this generation's Michael Jackson, an artist and an economy that's simply too big to fail (and too capable and adaptable to be truly uninteresting), congratulations, he's proven it. But the main feeling I have when waking up from a long night with these three albums is exhaustion. While the surprise release of “GNX” was airtight, refundable, and instantly quotable, this is just a monolith of melting Drake content.
