First off: Condolences to the people of Toronto. Drake’s Iceman rollout plopped full blocks of ice in the middle of downtown, turned the CN Tower into his personal projection room, and wrought two explosives displays, one of which “unnerved residents who had lived through a propane plant explosion in 2008.” Yes, the long road to Drizzy’s first solo effort since 2023’s For All the Dogs has been paved with built-for-Twitch stunts and promotional hijinks ripped right from Looney Toons. But his greatest fake out happened during a May 14 stream previewing all of Iceman, before revealing the release had company: two additional albums, Habibti and Maid of Honour.
All told, Drake delivered 43 new tracks (or nearly two-and-a-half hours of music) to sift through; among them are some of his best songs since Scorpion. So stretch out, get pajammy-ed up, and let’s get into it.
Surprise! It’s Triplets
Although Drake’s clear goal with this triple drop is unloading the clip, there’s a semblance to the sprawl. Iceman is the blockbuster rap album, packed with his heaviest beats in years. Habibti is a watery rendition of Heartbreak Drake, fitted out with classic R&B (“I’m Spent,” the on-the-nose “Classic”) and SWAG-style acoustics (“Rusty Intro”). Don’t throw on the cozy oversized sweater yet, though: Maid of Honour is the club record, landing like a more “Controlla”-fied sequel to Honestly, Nevermind, thanks in part to the lights-out “Fergalicious” flip in opener “Hoe Phase” (which is basically what Jack Harlow’s “First Class” could’ve been if it hadn’t, well, sucked). While Iceman is the centerpiece here, Maid of Honour stands to get more mileage this summer. Deploying a top-notch, slutty house-meets-electro record is one of the canniest moves he’s ever made. It’s also the one arena where Kendrick can’t compete.
Smoke For Everyone
Top of mind ahead of this album was how Drizzy would respond to the Kendrick Lamar feud that brought his career to such a low he sued his own label, lost, and decamped to Australia with faux sizzling bullet holes in his techwear. There’s plenty of smoke for K.Dot here, although it’s notably less virulent than the fire-and-brimstone of Drake’s last diss track, “The Heart Part 6.” On “Make Them Remember,” he compares Kendrick to petite basketball player Muggsy Bogues, deems GNX “mid, mid, mid, skip, skip,” and addresses the recent disappearance of “Not Like Us” and other Kendrick tracks from DSPs: “Who is this guy for real / I guess a magician / 100 million streams vanished, no one got questions.”
If any pre-release single really set the table for the score-settling, though, it’s “What Did I Miss?,” which has more ire for the friends Drake lost favor with amid Kendrickgate. Not-so-strays land on A$AP Rocky and Rihanna (“Your baby mama ain’t even post a single, damn where she at, damn where she at?”), Jay-Z (“I’ll take $500K, not the dinner, I never could learn shit from none of y’all”), Lebron James (“Please stop askin’ about what’s goin’ on with 23 and me / I’m a real n—a and he’s not, it’s in my DNA.”), and “Not Like Us” producer Mustard (“Mustard heard about us, gotta catch up to the slaps / You ain’t had one since me and YG rapped”). Later, on “Make Them Pay,” Drake has bones to pick with Rick Ross (“I was aidin’ Ross with streams before Adin Ross had ever streamed”) and J. Cole (“Fuck a big three anyway, there was too many chefs in the kitchen”). But his sharpest admonishment is for DJ Khaled, who Drake calls out for staying silent on the genocide in Gaza: “The beef was fully live, you went halal and got on your deen / And your people are still waitin’ for a free Palestine / but apparently everything isn’t black and white and red and green.” It’s not just posturing, either: Drake signed a ceasefire petition back in October, 2023.
