Kendrick Lamar tried to bury Drake. He won a Grammy for it. He performed the diss track at the Super Bowl. By every cultural metric available, the assassination was complete. And yet — here is Drake, very much alive, with a new album and something to say about all of it.
Iceman is the record Drake has been building toward since Not Like Us turned him into a punchline at barbecues and baby showers across America in 2024. It is not his best album. It is bloated in places, repetitive in others, and arrives alongside two surprise companion projects — Habibti and Maid of Honour — which perhaps says something about his inability to edit himself. But at its best, Iceman is the most emotionally honest thing Drake has made in years. And that matters more than its flaws.
Finally, Something Real to Be Angry About
The Drake of the last three solo albums was a man performing sadness at people who mostly did not exist. The Drake of Iceman is different. He has specific enemies. He has specific wounds. He has a list — and he works through it with a directness that his recent output has been badly missing.
Rick Ross and ASAP Rocky get clipped with petty efficiency on the Flywilliums and Ovrkast-produced Make Them Pay. DJ Khaled catches a stray that lands harder for its economy. LeBron James — spotted at Kendrick Lamar’s Pop-Out concert — gets filed under the betrayal section. Future, previously estranged following a pair of albums widely read as digs at Drake, shows up on the cheekily titled Ran to Atlanta — a direct acknowledgment of Lamar’s claim that Drake appropriates Atlanta rap culture — suggesting some degree of reconciliation, or at least a useful ceasefire.
The most compelling material is not the shots at famous targets. It is the quieter stuff. On Make Them Cry, Drake describes a friend who told him his OVO chain was stolen — but Drake knew the friend had sold it because he had fallen on hard times. The empathy and the inability to forgive sit side by side in the same verse, and it feels genuinely human rather than performed. “I could never forgive such a nefarious action,” he raps. “I’m still healin’ my own traumas, I’ve barely adapted.” That is the Drake Iceman needed more of.
Sonically, the album threads muted soul and maximalist trap with hooks that shift between condescension and desperation. Whisper My Name, built around a sinuous flute and militant 808s, trudges through the desert with a hook that functions simultaneously as a taunt and a set of marching orders. What Did I Miss — the first single — layers imperial horns and medieval flutes into something that sounds like a dynasty under siege.
The weakness is familiar. Mid-tempo tracks like Make Them Know, Firm Friends, and Make Them Remember blur into each other without sufficient distinction. Drake has always been resistant to cutting his albums down to their essentials, and Iceman suffers for it. The first dozen songs carry genuine momentum. The back half drifts.
Still, the overall achievement is real. Iceman has more tonal and sonic variety than anything Drake has released since Scorpion, and it carries an emotional authenticity that his recent work could not manufacture. Lamar’s diss was supposed to be a killshot. It may turn out to have been a defibrillator.
Rating: 3 out of 5
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