How to resurrect yourself and carry forward, head held aloft, after the biggest kill shot in hip-hop history? One way might be to hone a single, perfect statement—something narrow and vicious, a shiv to the ribs of the world that cheered your demise as your rival threw a Cheshire-Cat grin at you from the Super Bowl halftime show.
That might have been wise, but Drake has never been wise—or concise. Drake’s career has been predicated on the belief that there are endless ways to rephrase and restate the same two or three vague notions that have been swimming around like goldfish in his brainpan since before the iPhone was introduced: 1) Fame is hard, mostly because it indulges your worst tendencies, which you can always then blame on the heavy burdens of fame, and 2) Why do none of these conniving women and despicable hangers-on trust me?
So here comes two and a half hours of Drake music, spread across three distinct albums that trifurcate his persona: the aggrieved ICEMAN, the lovelorn HABIBTI, and the club-ready MAID OF HONOUR. There was probably no other way for Drake to blast himself out of purgatory: His ideal forum has always been the drunken voice note or the self-justifying Notes app screenshot. He never met an uncomfortable silence he couldn’t smother, and across his three new studio albums, he girds his loins for the longest filibuster of his existence.
Today, we’re only going to be looking at ICEMAN, both for the sake of honoring each distinct project and because we have limited breath to draw here on planet Earth. The cover invokes Michael Jackson’s iconic sequined glove—not usually a heartening sign of an artist readjusting his perspective and seeking firmer ground. But really, what would we do, as listeners, if the character Aubrey Drake Graham played in his music ever encountered “perspective”? He can’t. We count on him not to.
The problem is, all of this insight-free grousing used to be fun, and Drake’s music—his rap music, at least—hasn’t made prolonged contact with fun in a decade. Instead, every new Drake project is a buffet of humiliation, mortification, and self-serving delusion. On ICEMAN, we get a few teaspoons of nourishing hilarity, but mostly it’s a long platter of the cold, lumpy self-pity that made us push our chairs back in the first place.
On “Make Them Pay,” he’s still complaining about inflated streaming numbers. And on “Firm Friends.” And on “Dust.” He won’t leave the DSP stuff alone, and every time he mentions it, it invokes the same sinking feeling as when our in-laws won’t stop bringing up the same conspiracy theory at the dinner table. “I’m fightin’ the man, not suin’ the rapper,” Drake insists on “B’s on the Table,” referencing his dismissed lawsuit against UMG. This is an awkward position to take when he himself is facing multiple allegations of bot-farming and stream inflation.
The larger question looming over this is harder to dismiss: Who cares? As his relevance falters, Drake’s eye for slights and score-settling has grown so microscopic that even his stans need tweezers. Can you muster the enthusiasm for a celebration of OVO’s marketing manager, Nicholas “Neeks” Carino? Does it titillate you when he taunts A$AP Rocky because Rihanna failed to post about his single? Have you been wondering about his investment in Bitcoin futures? There are many bleak moments on ICEMAN, but the bottom might be “Firm Friends,” where we’re faced with lines like “private arbitration leads to resolution” in between entreaties for A$AP Rocky to kill himself.
He picks up some weapons-grade plutonium here and there, only to gingerly set it back down. Did you expect Drake the superstar to rap about a “free Palestine”? Maybe you will be less alarmed by the threat of substance when you learn that the entire bar is in service to dissing body-butter merchant DJ Khaled. On “Make Them Remember,” he asks, “Is it the fair skin or the Jewish roots/Why people want to not see me on top of the mountain like I do the Dew?” only to immediately pivot back to grousing about, what else, streaming numbers. To Drake, all of this stuff is interchangeable. His mouth is a wind tunnel and his thoughts are like dollars floating in it.
The production, meanwhile, drifts past like rumors of a nearby party—maybe down the block, or in a neighboring city. Production used to be the centerpiece of Drake’s music; Noah “40” Shebib lent depth and weight and shade even when Drake’s lyrics lacked all three qualities. But 40’s name appears on only two of these songs, and what’s mostly left is a gristle of disembodied vocal stems and workmanlike trap beats. Nearly every beat switches midway with a sigh, and an implied “What else is on?” He’s approached terminal VIP, where no overstock of guests can shock the proceedings to life: “Ran to Atlanta” credits eight producers, including Atlanta heavy-hitters Wheezy and Southside, and yet it sounds so limp and thin it might have been made with one finger.
Maybe we’re supposed to raise an eyebrow at Drake’s direct invocation of “Not Like Us”’s third verse, but here, as elsewhere, it’s difficult to parse his angle of attack. He’s still mumbling insults at Kendrick through a mouthful of broken teeth, stuff he might have had in his drafts folder that he didn’t get off in time before the neutron bomb went off in his face: “White kids listen to you ’cause they feel some guilt/And that’s how your soul get fulfilled/Handing out turkeys on camera inside of your hood, then you go back to the hills.” He doesn’t seem to grasp the rules of engagement, even now. The Mike Tyson “He’s no Alexander” rant, the Dusty Rhodes promo—these only work before the fight. After the crowd’s seen you stretched out on the canvas, no one’s sticking a mic in your face to hear you taunt your rival to “go blow the dust off your plaques.”
Talking shit has never been Drake’s forte, and he’s never managed it without ample moral support. 21 Savage is still here, keeping him warm, but otherwise, he’s by himself, and when he attempts the language of menace, he winds up accidentally speaking the language of luggage: “This shit like that bag you bring on the plane—it’ll carry on.” “I’m doing a big one/You doing a little one/What kind of man are you? A middle one,” he raps on the same song. What do you do with language like this? So rhythmically inert, so rudimentary and flat, you barely bother to notice it sounds like he’s potty-training a toddler.
Above all, ICEMAN represents a missed opportunity, maybe his last. Kendrick won, for sure—to the victor go the spoils. No one’s denying it. But we’ve seen this game tape before. Has anyone ever been so poised to speak about how it feels to lose—and to do so in unprecedented, history-making ways, on a scale unimaginable in any other hip-hop era—as Drake is in 2026? What if he had decided not to play the triumphalist game at all anymore?
On “Make Them Cry,” the album’s first song, he admits a piece of him “died” in 2024. He’s annoyed that everyone keeps asking him “how it felt to meet the grim reaper,” and shares bits of their humiliating comeback advice (“This album better have some big features”). He confesses he won’t touch psychedelics because he’s “scared to unpack it,” and then, in a perfect spit-take line, admits he doesn’t take his therapist seriously—because “she’s very attractive.” It’s the kind of thing no other rapper in his right mind would say, and it raises the question: Now that he’s failed, once and for all, to vanquish the bullies on the playground, couldn’t he just have returned to making them uncomfortable?
At his early-2010s peak, Drake served millennial cringe comedy so pure that all the supposed tough guys looked away. “I’ve had sex four times this week—I’ll explain” remains a laugh line so explosive you could teach it in a screenwriting class. He would’ve never lasted 16 seconds in a bark-off with DMX, but he made the man so thoroughly puzzled that the effect was nearly the same. What power does “Where my dogs at?” have against “Do I ever come up in the discussion over double-pump lattes and low-fat muffins?”
This was always Drake’s finishing move: the one where he comes out onto an empty black stage, lays out a single banana peel on the floor in front of a full audience, and then proceeds to deliberately slip on it, repeatedly and to everyone’s fascination and mortification. For all of his woeful obsession with numbers, this is the reason anyone ever streamed his music and actually listened. “What happened to Drake with the innocence? I don’t think we’ll be seeing him again,” he raps, ominously, at ICEMAN’s close. It’s a threat, maybe a promise, that he will never go away, nor will he ever stop turning out the same bleak, joyless rap that seems to please no one, least of all its maker.
