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\n His new album trilogy is at once some of his most exciting and most perfunctory music of the decade.
\n Photo: Drake\/Youtube\n <\/p>\n
Two years ago, Drake<\/a> experienced one of the most embarrassing defeats<\/a> in rap-beef history by going up against Kendrick Lamar and half a Rolodex of old friends. He then tried to make his label pay for the dent in his good image, moving with all the grace of a cartoon character tumbling down a rocky cliffside. Drake\u2019s lawsuit against Universal Music Group<\/a> famously claimed he was a victim of a bot-farming scheme that gave Lamar\u2019s \u201cNot Like Us\u201d unfair traction in their feud. It also framed page after page of social-media reactions as proof that real fans believed every word of the song, which he says contains libelous rumors such as his being a pedophile. The suit failed<\/a> spectacularly and continues to flail in appeals. Drake now understands that any consensus around him is irreparably broken. Some see a king; others, a fraud. Last week he returned with his long-awaited and highly publicized ninth album, Iceman, plus two more full-lengths no one saw coming<\/a>, Maid of Honour and Habibti. It is at once some of his most exciting and most perfunctory music of the decade.<\/p>\n Iceman frontloads the fallout from the 2024 \u201c20 vs. 1<\/a>,\u201d as Drake calls it, on account of an avalanche of spite from his erstwhile friends. The album is an expanse of frosty raps that picks off adversaries one by one. Maid of Honour and Habibti buzz off toward different genres \u2014 global party jams, wounded R&B \u2014 and map the Toronto rapper-singer\u2019s journey out of an all-consuming vengeance. \u201cI made this to make this to make this,\u201d Drake said on a livestream announcing the trilogy. There are separate albums for people who come to his music to pout, dance, and swoon. The middle album, Maid of Honor, fares best by minimizing both Iceman\u2019s boiling ire and Habibti\u2019s sleepy bedroom banter. The differing temperaments share a goal of reeling us back into Drake\u2019s world while collectively drowning out his public headaches. Chris Brown<\/a> and Morgan Wallen<\/a> have similarly industrialized bloat to recover from appalling incidents, allegations, and court cases via sensory overload, putting out motion-picture-length works reliably stuffed with clashing sounds and ideas.<\/p>\n Over two and a half hours and 43 songs, you get Drake as folk singer, alt-rocker, \u201980s electro MC, \u201990s West Coast rapper, crypto baron<\/a>, and other characters. It feels like a museum of past and possible Drakes attempting to meet the divided and ideologically siloed internet. Drake revisits the approach of his 2018 double album, Scorpion<\/a>, which was half venting sessions about Pusha T publicly embarrassing him and half top-flight radio jams. That album was plagued by a nagging emotional unevenness. With his triple album, he confines disparate emotions and approaches to genre to individual albums, making each one (particularly the lengthier Iceman) feel like a secluded vacation \u2014 that lasts a few days too long. This doesn\u2019t save the project from filler, but it grants each mood environment its own respective commercial and critical reception. Drake is collecting both pans and acclaim, sometimes from the same<\/a> publications<\/a>.<\/p>\n As with JA\u0178-Z\u2019s The Blueprint 2: The Gift & the Curse, released after the peak of his aughts tiff with Nas, there are enough sturdy ideas between the three projects to pack a tightly pruned, formidable single album. But the gesture is the point. Drake would like you to think nobody else at his station would go for this. (Beyonc\u00e9 lets us marinate in a reinvention for years; Taylor Swift snuck a second half of The Tortured Poets Department in the wee hours of release night, but the 31-song version was unified in its themes of regret and revenge.) Drake occupying the top-three spots on Billboard\u2019s album chart, as he\u2019s projected to do, would underscore his insinuations that he\u2019s a much bigger deal than anyone he\u2019s retaliating against, all of whom at some point have needed the stimulus package of his co-sign. This era is a show of dominance.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n Iceman got the extended promotional push in a series of livestreams<\/a> full of song snippets and slices of Toronto life and is on track to move three times as many equivalent units as the other two albums. After a summer of mysterious teasers, Drake\u2019s fourth and final livestream ahead of the album drops suggested that Iceman\u2019s title is a reference to Richard Kuklinski<\/a>, the tristate-area mob hit man (not the X-Men icon<\/a>). Drake adopts the Iceman nickname to traverse his city exacting revenge on naysayers and fence-sitters throughout the stream. The videos are an unsubtle rejoinder to the West Coast ruler status Lamar flaunted on GNX<\/a>. They scream, That\u2019s not the only region in rap! The king in the north goes after Lamar and LeBron James \u2014 who is guilty of the grave sin of attending Lamar\u2019s Kia Forum victory-lap performance in 2024 \u2014 in \u201cMake Them Remember,\u201d lurking in what appears to be the Toronto City Council chamber and Mayor Olivia Chow\u2019s city-hall office. In \u201c2 Hard 4 the Radio,\u201d he kicks Cali flows inside the CN Tower. Iceman hits from inaccessible places of power.<\/p>\n This album makes you feel like it\u2019s been only two weeks since \u201cNot Like Us.\u201d The sleek, snooty \u201cJanice STFU\u201d \u2014\u00a0\u201cHandin\u2019 out turkeys on-camera inside of your hood, then you go back to the hills\u201d \u2014 is an answer track that should have immediately followed Lamar\u2019s hit. These aren\u2019t Drake\u2019s best raps, but they\u2019re honest about being in the unusual position of getting deep-fried by a decade\u2019s worth of friends at an ultimately low cost to his marketability. Drake\u2019s mob-boss-on-quaaludes act on \u201cBurning Bridges<\/a>\u201d \u2014 \u201cYour baby mama ain\u2019t even post your single\u201d \u2014 is a hilarious postscript to A$AP Rocky\u2019s<\/a> January jab at his partner Rihanna\u2019s world-famous ex<\/a>: \u201cStole my flow, so I stole ya bitch.\u201d Iceman\u2019s aim is to turn the tables, not to explain why Drake was ever under fire, so mixed messages are bountiful. On \u201cWhisper My Name,\u201d he juggles disdain for someone (likely J. Cole<\/a>) \u201csitting with Farrakhan\u201d and boasts about having gangsters in his circle who are out observing Ramadan, repudiating and basking in Nation of Islam history and optics in the same song and video<\/a>. He\u2019s a Coachella alum now, he also announces. He digs into the web of attention-farming tactics<\/a> in mass media but only as it suits him. He wants you to think his rap Royal Rumble was fixed against him, and he\u2019s aggressively monetizing the backlash.<\/p>\n If you\u2019ve been aching to see Drake leave his haters behind, Maid of Honour and Habibti, for the most part, drop the issue. A looseness in sound works for him on Maid, the highlight of the package. It takes after his brilliant 2017 mixtape More Life, a fusion of hip-hop, R&B, U.K. grime, dancehall, and Afrobeats where he slipped in and out of regional accents. One plus side to the 2024 free-for-all is that Drake hates half his roster of big-ticket features now, most of whom are men, which freed up space for women to get a boost throughout the trilogy. Brooklyn\u2019s Stunna Sandy shines on Maid\u2019s sweet and mantralike \u201cOutside Tweaking,\u201d and St. Louis\u2019s Sexyy Red pops up on \u201cCheetah Print,\u201d a breezy electro jam that fizzles out on an unfortunately rote freestyle music detour.<\/p>\n We\u2019re told at the end of Iceman that \u201cinnocent Drake\u201d is never coming back \u2014 until he does on the horny but sometimes corny Maid: \u201cGirl, it\u2019s your birthday, you can cry if you want to \/ You can walk in the mall, you can buy what you want to,\u201d he sings when the beat changes in \u201cCheetah.\u201d \u201cWe got so much motion,\u201d he says on the dizzily infatuated \u201cWNBA,\u201d \u201cI\u2019m taking shit for motion sickness.\u201d The second album\u2019s restlessness capitalizes on the success from \u201cNokia\u201d off $ome $exy $ongs 4 U, an upbeat break from beef that went to No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 2025. Maid lounges almost entirely in a spirit of moonlit longing, yielding some of the most left-field moves of Drake\u2019s decade. The yearning new jack swing \u201cStuck\u201d sounds like it\u2019s blaring off a warped cassette tape from a good Keith Sweat year, and \u201cGoose and the Juice\u201d dislodges from time as it mixes \u201980 gated reverb and auto-tuned pillow talk.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n Habibti is the patchiest of the batch. The third installment sinks further in slow jams that would have dragged down other albums, and portions feel superfluous since Maid approaches that aesthetic with more range. But it has moments that pop. Like Iceman\u2019s \u201cBurning Bridges,\u201d \u201cGen 5\u201d is a haughty and anesthetized performance of an exhausted asshole addressing business he doesn\u2019t care to, with Drake barking out a half-sorry to a significant other for something unmentioned in the track. \u201cHigh Fives,\u201d a bubbly love song punctuated by a sweet \u201cMashallah,\u201d gets Drake back to shouting out various women in his life, as on the Scorpion No. 1 \u201cIn My Feelings.\u201d Without getting jammed up in animosity like Iceman, Habibti \u2014 \u201c& other nicknames I call my dear city,\u201d the artist\u2019s Apple Music description adds of the Arabic term of endearment\u00a0\u2014 waves off those like Rick Ross, who gleefully dismissed<\/a> Drake\u2019s Blackness during the 2024 battle, resisting any binary thinking about culture and race.<\/p>\n The trilogy dabbles in Arabic phrases and documents Drake\u2019s trips all over the Middle East; nods to his Muslim associates; and jabs at DJ Khaled<\/a>, whose parents emigrated to the U.S. from Palestine, over his silence on Gaza. (Drake signed the Artists4Ceasefire<\/a> letter in 2023.) Habibti quietly acknowledges Toronto as home to countless faiths and races, to Black and Arab experiences, as it turns the dial back to the old romantic Drake. He wants to appeal to all the proverbial political aisles: The day of the albums\u2019 release, the White House Twitter account dropped a MAGA version of Iceman\u2019s cover, leaning into the Thriller-glove gesture\u2019s resemblance<\/a> to the white-power \u201cokay\u201d hand sign<\/a>. The next week, the White House Tiktok account posted a Trump fan cam featuring ICE making arrests soundtracked by the album\u2019s outro. Drake isn\u2019t rushing to condemn this use of his work as Sabrina Carpenter, Radiohead, and others have done.<\/p>\n