Drake ‘Iceman’ Review: An Insular Ode to Self-Pity

There’s a brief moment near the start of Drake’s Iceman where the Canadian rapper’s trademark commitment-averse lothario routine appears, against all odds, to be cracking. “I have to father my mother and treat my son’s grandfather like my older brother,” he wearily remarks on opener “Make Them Cry,” before rifling through a laundry list of anxieties.

Before long, though, Drake circles back to the fallout from his 2024 feud with Kendrick Lamar, framing himself as the target of people who are eager to see him “all bent out of shape, rattled, and shaken.” They want to “talk about a battle,” he claims, but he’s “battlin’ patience.” Then comes the obligatory mafioso cosplay—“It’ll take more than six pallbearers to carry that casket”—and Drake begins to lose track of the plot entirely.

Iceman plays like a concept album set in an alternate universe where a two-year-old rap beef remains the driving discourse of public life, as though millions of people are waking up each morning and asking themselves how Drake is holding up. The answer: paradoxically, not very well, and also very well. This has been the Drizzy dichotomy for some time now, and it’s rarely felt more contradictory than it does here. Case in point: on “Make Them Remember,” he sneers, “Fuck a Billboard number one, man, whoopty-doo,” then immediately pivots to claiming the music industry at large is “riggin’ the game” against him. He’s still pop royalty, but he also sounds bitterly convinced that everyone closest to him has betrayed him.

Drake rarely names his targets outright, relying instead on veiled (but easily decipherable) references: a Pusha-T jab here, a petty shot at Rihanna and A$AP Rocky there (Drake asks why Rocky’s “baby mama ain’t even post your single” from the Harlem rapper’s latest album on “Burning Bridges,” a dig so negligible that it requires tweezers to dissect). Caring about any of this requires much knowledge of the Drake Cinematic Universe, but even the most devoted stans would be hard-pressed to pretend that all this skittish score-settling isn’t exhausting.

And that’s not even getting to the elephant in the room: Kendrick Lamar, toward whom Drake remains obsessively spiteful. He not-so-indirectly suggests that Kung-Fu Kenny is fake woke and that his fanbase is composed entirely of educated white boys (“Janice STFU”), that he’s short (“Make Them Remember”), and that his streaming stats are allegedly inflated, which he feels the need to mention twice (“Make Them Pay” and “Firm Friends”). By the time a checked-out 21 Savage shows up on “B’s on the Table,” you stop caring which enemy is being coyly dragged and start wishing Drake would find a new emotional setting beyond aggrieved self-pity.

The last decade of Drake’s career has been defined by his refusal to deviate from his trusted aesthetic, save for a few rare exceptions, but Iceman’s real problem is how lifelessly he runs through the formula. Apart from “Ran to Atlanta,” loaded with eerie synths and bouncy blasts of bass, there’s seldom a moment here one could reasonably call catchy. Being Drake is, now, solemn business. Sorry, Jesus, but the crucifixion starts to seem a little overblown after listening to an hour of Drake rapping about the spiritual agony of losing a rap beef.