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Met is easy to estimate Drake’s fall from grace. Of course, both were declared losers the ultimate rap cow recently, and he’s currently engaged in a long-running feud with his record label over a rap battle that everyone except Drake and his lawyers seem to think is pretty bad. He is also facing charges to say that he illegally misled viewers into gambling games – pretending to bet his own money while using money from an online casino he promoted – and that he also took money from the said online casino to boost it (Drake did not respond to the allegations; Stake, the casino, described one of the charges as “absurd”). Also in the case is Adin Ross, a denizen of the manosphere that Drake has been walking around, never mind that other guests on the river Ross were Andrew Tate and Nick Fuentes.
similarly, Drake he is still the most popular rapper in the world. All this greatly influenced his popularity, his last album – Some Sexy Songs 4 U, The 2025 deal with PartyNextDoor – would have died at the box office, instead of entering the US charts at No 1 and selling a million copies. If his public record seems a little tarnished, well, we live in an age of short attention spans and short memories: it would only take one unquestionable sound – Dance One or Hotline Bling 2.0 – to wipe the slate clean.
In fact, Drake released three albums: not only Iceman, the album he has been promoting for weeks through high-profile previews, but Habibti and Maid of Honor which have not yet been released. No doubt there are others out there who, besides themselves, are reveling in this munificence, but for anyone other than diehards, the reaction to this story would be: uh-oh.
The eternal criticism of the albums of the last days of Drake is that they are too long, but between them, Iceman, Maid of Honor and Habibti have 43 songs and songs of more than two and a half hours: if you thought that Scorpion or Certified Lover Boy sank a little, it turned out that they were just songs. appetizer. The smorgasbord of riding, and delicious menu of your welcome, is now given.
In fairness, there’s some good stuff here, all about Iceman. Run to Atlanta is wonderfully crafted, a chilling blast of terrifying electricity. Burning Bridges is excellent, a clever switch between jazzy piano and slow R&B jams. The Same World Economy shifts itself in the middle, pulsing synths and trap-inspired beats – created by then-British man Wraith9 – giving way to harsh sampled vocals and industrial music. Together they create an empty, lonely culture that reduces the insulting words, full of bragging about his wealth and the mixing of sex and disturbing the opinions of other artists: the most uncertain opinion that Kendrick Lamar was secretly eager to stop the musical controversy that he won; attacks on A$AP Rocky and NBA star LeBron James for their infidelity. Anyone who wants to know what he thinks about Drake after his public humiliation — scorned, isolated, still reeling from the events of two years ago when he touched a nerve — can check it out here.
The story is that the big moments are among the many broken things: filled next to Janice STFU (which lazily interprets the oldest and most famous song of Lykke Li) and B on the Table, while the guest 21 Savage sounds as if he is tired of his thoughts. Little Birdie and Don’t Worry don’t eat, and all the words in the world can’t give them life. Some songs just sound like BTS because it took a whole lot of work to get noticed” – while others shout out Adin Ross and seem designed to appeal to Ross’s fanbase (“I fool him when I pay the rent”). It’s as different as anything Drake has released in the last decade, but the real problem is that there are still two more albums to go.
And that’s where the problems start. In short, Maid of Honor focuses on the dancefloor – Cheetah Print samples not Peggy Gou’s song (It Goes Like) Nanana, but, oh Christ, DJ Caspar’s unusual Cha Cha Slide – while Habibti leans more towards R&B. You could argue that this amounts to Drake showing off his diversity, but it would be a more convincing argument if the album had one memorable hook or melody. But they don’t. Immersed in Auto-Tune, the content of Habibti sounds like an old place that is slowly being revived because of this, many familiar songs – “big womb but I feel like there’s no one at home”, “some people messed with me but I can’t let it” – which will happen to you like Dr. album. Girl of Honor is the best so far because she seems to be unrecognizable, but sounds good about what she’s trying to sing – the burst of distorted synth at the end of BBW, the mid-80s fun of Stuck, the electro pastiche of Road Trips – and shows Drake rekindling the world with his famous Jamaican name. Against some pretty tough competition, this is probably the most difficult thing about Things Drake Doesn’t Do.
Finishing with Princess, a mess, made up of half-disturbed guitar and Auto-Tuned vocals. In fact, there’s something strange about the whole three-album business, as if it wasn’t well thought out. The point to open is to brag loudly about how Drake refuses to give in to fan demands for high-profile guest appearances when he has high-profile guest appearances, from Central Cee doing everything he can to revive the low support of the Who One, to Molly Santana’s impressive turn on Run to Atlanta? What made him think that releasing a guitar solo moment to accompany Habibti’s Rusty Intro was a good idea?
Of course, what made him think that releasing three albums Was it a good idea? You’d have to wrack your brain trying to think of any artist in pop history who was so gifted, so blessed with so much to say, that he could come up with two and a half hours of compelling music at once. The most recent version of Sign o’ Times said that Prince had achieved an incredible level of power – this quality was not included in CD after CD of unreleased material – but even Prince, not a man dedicated to reducing himself in his wisdom, clearly thought that killing his audience at once would be like testing their patience.
But if Drake in 2026 is clearly not Prince in 1987, he looks like Prince a few years later, when he began to deliberately release low-quality albums as a way to fulfill the contract of records that he called “slavery”: once, he asked to release two on the same day. One of the themes of the album’s music is how Drake wants to leave the deal with Universal that he said earned him $360m: “I’m fine with being independent… I just want to be free”, he sang in the song Make Them Pay, while on B’s on the Table, he plans what he will do against the label not as a desperate person, but as a “nonsense person”. Although many albums are owed to them, there are only three who deserve it now – all kinds of success. But it’s a dangerous strategy: the decline of these products could reduce the suspension of Drake and all but the aforementioned.
