Oh, Drake. In perhaps the least surprising “surprise” of the year, the Canadian star has dropped not one but three albums, spanning an eye-watering total of 43 songs (around 142 minutes and 14 seconds).
He just can’t help himself. For years now, one of the biggest of Drake’s myriad issues has been his inability to self-edit. Bloat plagued 2018’s Scorpion and 2023’s For All the Dogs, both of which contained no fewer than 23 songs. It didn’t help that the material was severely lacking, too. And now we have not just Iceman – promoted via silly immersive stunts like a giant block of ice dumped in the centre of Toronto – but also Maid of Honour and Habibti.
So why three albums? Well, strained relations with his record label, Universal, might have something to do with it. Drake filed a lawsuit against the company last year over his sparring partner Kendrick Lamar’s Grammy-winning killshot of a diss track, “Not Like Us”, which accused him and his friends of being “certified paedophiles”. Drake’s grievance was that Universal Music Group (UMG), to which Lamar is also signed, allowed him to be defamed by releasing and promoting the track. The lawsuit was dismissed last year after a judge ruled that no reasonable person would understand the “paedophiles” allegation to be factual in a rap battle context; UMG said it was looking forward to continuing its work with Drake, but you had the distinct impression the feeling wasn’t mutual. (Drake also appealed the decision in court just last month.)
Now, in titbits smattered across these three projects, Drake all but confirms he wants out of a deal reported in 2022 to be worth around $400m. “I’m better off independent, they should let him leave, yeah/ ‘Cause I just wanna be free,” he raps on “Make Them Pay” from Iceman. Then, on “Janice STFU”, he declares: “Swear my label gotta free me, baby.” On “B’s on the Table” with 21 Savage, he insists he’s “fightin’ the man, not the rapper”, an apparent riposte to the hip-hop community that (justifiably?) mocked him over his UMG lawsuit.
It’s a relief, in a way, to hear him acknowledge on “Make Them Know” that he’s far from the introspective, vulnerable and frequently funny artist of 2010’s Thank Me Later, 2013’s Nothing was the Same or 2017’s More Life. “What happened to Drake with the innocence,” he echoes, “I don’t think that we’ll be seeing him again.” It’s heartbreaking, frankly, more so when on “High Fives” he admits his torn state of being: “I’m so loved and I’m so hated/ So conflicted, I’m so jaded.”
But as much as he lashes out at fake friends and traitors – and at the people who scrambled to side with Lamar during their 2024 beef – Drake continues to be his own worst enemy. Where Iceman starts strong, it quickly melts into a soggy mess of erratic beat switches, misogyny, autotune and a rehashing of old gripes. Frustratingly, some of his best work in years is present here (opener “Make Them Cry” is superb, sharp and self-aware). But it’s obscured by the bad. “What Did I Miss” and “2 Hard 4 the Radio” are cheesy and self-important – on the latter, he appears to reject his pop identity and instead justify the toxicity of For All the Dogs: “Yeah, it’s Mr Popstar, that’s the way it go/ Now I’m too hard for the f***in’ radio.”
Back to “Make Them Cry”, though. It’s an all-too rare crack in Drake’s diamond-encrusted suit of armour, a brief concession to calls for a return to that old vulnerability. We learn that the fallout from the Lamar feud did hurt him (“All I can think about is the mountain to climb and the conversations surrounding my music like they’re Twin Peak/ With Dot back in 2024 was a big piece”), that his dad has cancer (“we battlin’ stages”), and that he’s stressed about turning 40 in October. After this five-minute opus, it goes rapidly downhill, and we’re back to bragging about money, cars, property… and sniping at foes who moved on a long time ago.
Maid of Honour, by contrast, is a breath of fresh air. There are playful skits, catchy melodies, smart samples and guest features. “Amazing Shape” with Popcaan incorporates dancehall legend Beenie Man’s 1998 classic “Who I Am” (previously best used on Krept and Konan’s 2015 single “Freak of the Week”). He brings back his divisive Jamaican patois – a big factor in the “culture vulture” allegations he’s faced over the years – for the infectious “Which One”, with UK rapper Central Cee and loaded with nods to Rihanna (“then werk werk werk werk werk”) and the Spice Girls. On “BBW” he sings in a low, sexy murmur before the kick of Daft Punk-indebted synths; the Eighties-influenced “Stuck” might be his most blatant tribute to his hero, Michael Jackson (well, that and the bedazzled glove on the Iceman album cover).
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I’m still unpacking Habibti, but I hate it. It’s a strange amalgamation of the other two albums, opening with a baffling, autotuned interpolation of “Auld Lang Syne” on “Rusty Intro”, in which he wonders what his ex-girlfriends might be saying about him. The whole record feels like an unfiltered word-vomit of everything he hasn’t processed, whether on the weird and hypocritical slut-shaming of “Slap the City” (“You expect men you fuckin’ to buy you nice things, but you wouldn’t call it transactional… You say I slapped the whole city, you slapped up like half of it”) or the boring, creepy “Classic” (“Touching your body, your man doesn’t love you/ So let me know if I should stick around”). There is one, excellent album in all of this, somewhere. If only the Iceman could let himself thaw.