After his Kendrick Lamar feud, Drake alienated female fans. With new album Iceman, he’s aiming for the top of the charts again
Despite his A-list pop star status, there’s been a noticeable scrappiness to Drake’s rollout for his ninth album, Iceman. Last month, the rapper iced out his favorite court-side seats at the Toronto Raptors’ arena, with faux icicles dangling from the chairs. He followed that up with a more brazen stunt: a huge block of ice in downtown Toronto for the public to chip at until it thawed, revealing the album date. In early May, he debuted a quirky episodic series on YouTube featuring skits in an ice manufacturing plant and the rapper driving an Iceman-branded truck around Toronto. The mood seemed cheeky and defiant: good news for anyone who missed the memester of his 2016 viral hit Hotline Bling.
It has been an eventful and complicated time for Drake since his most recent solo studio album, 2023’s For All the Dogs. While he is still the highest streamed rapper artist in the world, he has been attacked by hip-hop. Two years ago, Compton rapper Kendrick Lamar and Drake engaged in a battle that no one came out of unscathed. There were accusations of intimate partner violence towards Lamar, a song about a possible daughter that Drake has hid, and Lamar’s Grammy-winning death blow – Not Like Us – about Drake being a hip-hop “colonizer” who chases after young women. Consensus has said that he lost the beef between him and Lamar, and the consensus is right, but the backlash against Drake was already starting to formulate before Lamar issued the first warning shot in 2024 diss track Like That.
