What's worse than losing the most consequential rap beef of all time? Trying to relitigate it in court. If "Not Like Us," Kendrick Lamar's chart-topping diss that broke Spotify's single-day streams record, was the decisive blow to Drake's momentum, there may be no more telling moment in his career than when he subsequently accused the streamer and his own label, Universal Music Group, of artificially inflating the song's numbers. A November 2024 petition alleged the music behemoths had conspired, using bots and payola schemes, to "manipulate and saturate the streaming services and airwaves." Drake withdrew that petition a few months later, only to then sue Universal for defamation, claiming that in releasing and marketing "Not Like Us," the label "decided to publish, promote, exploit, and monetize allegations that it understood were not only false, but dangerous." The suit was dismissed last October, ending a futile bid to delegitimize Lamar's victory as a corporate shell game, a plot to undermine his own stranglehold on the music business. But the attempt also revealed something about Drake's perennial tactic for assessing his supremacy.
Steve Stoute once said that if Drake ever went independent, "the music business is done." For at least the last decade, that has been the perception around which his music chiefly swaggers. He is the defining star of the streaming era, with a data-backed omnipresence, who has long forsaken the Grammys or critical consensus as arbiters of success. His rebuttal to any criticism has remained constant: Numbers don't lie, and his numbers are unparalleled. So the ground shuddered when, suddenly, the standard by which he had measured himself was bolstering the claim of a rival — one who had delivered acknowledged classics and won a Pulitzer, no less. "Not Like Us" was not only a streaming juggernaut, but the Grammys' song and record of the year. The album GNX arrived hot on its trail, with yet another record of the year winner, and an explosive Super Bowl halftime show and sold-out tour with SZA made the numbers feel substantiated, while also meaningless: What did the stats matter for one of the best disses of all time, one that only its creator could make? Kendrick had won not just the beef but the culture war, all while playing Drake's game. All that was left for the Toronto big shot was to seethe and plot.
2024 marked the first year that Drake did not release some kind of full-length project — solo album, mixtape, collab or compilation — since the massive 2016 album Views cemented him as the avatar for a then-nascent streaming model. He initiated his slow rehabilitation campaign that August by dumping 100 gigabytes worth of behind-the-scenes content online, which is where he began teasing an album called Iceman. A collaborative LP stanched the bleeding some in 2025, but only a solo move would calm the shareholders and prevent a sell-off of Drake stock.
On Friday, the rapper finally made his return with a big splash, dropping not one new album but three: Iceman, Maid of Honour and Habibti. "Spent months in the corner, just me and my back / I'm used to this, I'm numb to that / I know I just gotta adapt / Let's wait on your Spotify Wrapped," he raps on "B's on the Table," and that is where we find Drake again on these releases: striving to monopolize the playlist economy once more, at any cost.
Each new album compartmentalizes a defining aspect of the Drake oeuvre. Iceman is the rap LP, settling all gripes with somber, staticky verses that mime a pensive posture. Maid of Honour is world pop, blending Views-like dancehall and Honestly, Nevermind-ish house with lesser swirls of club, baile funk and new jack swing. Habibti is equally melodic, but tuned specifically to a monochromatic R&B frequency of Drake's own design, channeling the spinning back rooms of his warped megalopolis Houstatlantavegas. Together they reflect a strategy of max coverage, omnidirectional in pursuit of blanket narrative insurance: Each album is distinctly Drake, all have their moments, none are inspired.
Chalk at least some of that strain up to the pressure of convincing the world you aren't done for after such a public dragging. "Buried alive, somеone come dig me up," he raps on "Janice STFU." There's plenty more where that came from: "Reportin' live from the scene where I wasn't supposed to be revived by the EMTs" ("Firm Friends"); "You know what it is if you double back / Should've put another blade in my back / Should've stood over and double-tapped" ("B's on the Table"). There is a zombified streak to his return from the dead, stitching together Frankensteined creations from across the various modes of his discography. Several songs will, just as the first beat is getting going, click over to reveal another, Drakier beat, and the albums are strewn with self-referential callbacks (among them the Meek Mill diss "Back to Back" and If You're Reading This, It's Too Late's "Energy"), as reminders of his longevity and the dustups he's survived.
If there is a silver lining to the derailment that ensued after Kendrick declared war with "Like That" two years ago, it's that Drake, notoriously wary and emboldened by the notion of envious double-crossers in his life, now has plenty. When he first rapped that he had a lot of enemies trying to drain him of his energy, those foes were faceless. These days the paranoia is valid, his no new friends code applied retroactively to old ones, too.
There are, obviously, veiled shots at Kendrick Lamar here. But he joins a laundry list of frenemies: longtime adversary Pusha T (and fellow Virginian Pharrell Williams by proxy); J. Cole, demoted from co-medalist in rap's "Big Three" to third-party observer; Jay-Z, one-time mentor turned halftime show booker; Rick Ross, A$AP Rocky, DJ Khaled and Dr. Dre, former rap allies at various levels of culpability; LeBron James and DeMar DeRozan, athlete-associates who defected for LA ties. In the face of so much team-switching, Drake also has some choice words for fair-weather fans who took the winning side: "Shout out to the fake fans, I thought we had an arrangement," he raps on "Make Them Cry." "How many times have you tried to tell me I had a replacement?" The remainder of his ire goes to Universal, for seemingly enabling all of the turncoats. "They say conclusions were drawn, but I'm in super denial / What is a loss? I'll be damned if I'm losin' it now / I'm the golden goose, shakin' things up at Lucian's house / I'm in the battlefield really puttin' boots to the ground," he raps on "Make Them Remember," namechecking UMG CEO Lucian Grainge.
In a social environment that incentivizes engagement farming, it's no shock that Drake would take this all-eyes opportunity to flood the zone with feed-filling content, as if meeting an imagined quota. A common sentiment online among Drake stans during his longer-than-normal layoff was to express fealty: They were not with the others who yelled "A minor" at the top of their lungs on a May weekend, or during the Pop Out livestream, or during the Super Bowl, or at their cousin's birthday bash. They protested, were loyal, and as such didn't deserve to have their trough emptied. They would often outright say they needed new Drake music for their playlists, a hallmark of how strangely transactional artist-audience relationships have become. By those parameters, this plan of action makes a lot of sense — as do the songs, which both revel in satisfying demand and resent having to do so. "Am I your GOAT? Well, probably not / I probably was, but you probably forgot," he snaps on "Whisper My Name."
While his strategy prizes abundance, and feels spite-driven in its effort to return to the eye-level shelf of the pop marketplace, there are reminders here of the craftsmanship that secured him that position in the first place. On sections on Maid of Honour and Habibti, Drake retreats into his roles as bankable hitmaker and photo-dump epigraphist, and sounds refreshed by the familiarity: the clicking, cheeky "Cheetah Print"; the muted island gyrator "New Bestie," which revs up as it goes; the bleated, slow-rolling "WNBA"; the caricatured, vocally fluid "I'm Spent." As the projects furthest removed from beef and its dour sensibility, both albums are lighter and easier to listen to than Iceman, which has eye-rolling potential for anyone who sees the matter of succession as well and truly settled. And yet, it's that album that bristles with greater purpose and holds the music with the most narrative intrigue.
On songs like "Janice STFU," "Make Them Remember" and "Firm Friends," the artist is limber and potent, seemingly reclined in his verses even as he chucks 'bows. He puts it all together on the Deniece Williams-sampling "Make Them Pay," which reckons with his unplanned heel turn with composure, treating it like a sacrifice he is making for all our sakes. "F*** a Big Three anyway, there was too many chefs in the kitchen, it was a mess to begin with / And now they got a new GOAT, and we gotta test the position," he raps. It's the closest he comes to fully acknowledging his fall from pole position, a feint at looking inward before withdrawing to the safety of pretense: "Damn, who is this guy for real? I guess a magician / Hundred million streams vanished, no one got questions for n****s."
For all his tantrums about bots, Drake inhabits the same screenland he is criticizing, a world of juked stats, behind-the scenes-manipulations and simulated inducements, which all now feel like a microcosm of our entire social reality. If you've done any reading lately about "dead internet theory," or how the feed is fake, or PR firms creating engineered hype for artists, you are aware of the increasingly illusory nature of our communal spaces online, the persistent notion that the culture beyond your immediate field of vision may be doctored or utterly fabricated. So much of what we experience now has the potential to be artificial, tampered with, unreal.
That is the realm where Drake has always lived: a murky soup of sham interactions, where social climbers, gold diggers, bottom feeders and sandbaggers all try to pull the wool over his eyes to get over in some way. Or at least that's how he sees it, in a lyrical world that can often feel like a maze of half-truths itself. On these albums, he often finds himself in liminal spaces where the "real" and simulacra overlap. "You write me heartfelt words I find out Chat's behind," he croons on "Prioritizing." He sputters through "Outside Tweaking" as he enters the celebrity distortion field of OnlyFans, which turns him from megastar to reluctant idolator, and navigates a thinly veiled deception: "Askin' if your manager could come / It seem like your manager's your man." Elsewhere, another woman tries to leverage release info out of him that she can use to "finesse" Polymarket. He seems exhausted by the doublespeak, and listening to his exhaustion is exhausting.
One approach that really could stick it to the nonbelievers, underachievers and tweet-and-deleters would be to keep it simple: Deliver a taut, dynamic album that functions as a singular statement. Incensed as Drake seems, he can't seem to stray from the Spotify way, which founder Daniel Ek laid out to Music Ally in 2020: "The artists today that are making it realize that it's about creating a continuous engagement with their fans. It is about putting the work in, about the storytelling around the album, and about keeping a continuous dialogue with your fans." Drake could have made one pointed and affecting LP about any single aspect of the last two years in exile: the horror of seeing your castle ransacked, the isolation of being made public enemy No. 1, the whiplash of a dramatic shift in public perception, trying to maintain your grasp on a touch-and-go relevance slipping through your fingers. But that doesn't serve the algorithms in the same way.
It also doesn't serve the ego. At the start of Iceman, during a rare moment of vulnerability, the rapper reveals that his longtime friend and producer Noah "40" Shebib has asked more of him: "Basically he's sayin' I got growin' up to do, I gotta dig deep." But there is so little here in the way of accountability, and the attempts to make us dance feel diversionary. Drake seems to still believe the defeat he suffered is a mirage, or at least more about him than his opponent. Yet the ways in which the two MCs have asserted their dominion is a symbol of the gap between them. Kendrick acknowledged Drake's positioning, and treated it as a righteous cultural undertaking to flip the table over and set us on a new paradigm. Drake, a poor sport, has never granted Kendrick the same courtesy, and his answer here is to try and reset the table exactly as it was. There is some great music trapped beneath the avalanche, but no coherent message to build around. Even if this is some kind of ploy to get out of his current contract, as he hints a few times throughout, it is only made possible by a streaming ethic he has embodied and espoused: content is king, and its consumption is all that matters.
Kendrick Lamar was recently named one of the 30 Greatest Living American Songwriters by The New York Times, and I've been thinking about something the funk legend George Clinton says in his endorsement: "There are a lot of slick writers out here nowadays with lyrics and things, but he writes with soul," Clinton explains. "He's at that point where he can move the conversation." It is those things I hear missing in Drake's music now: writing with soul, and any attempt to move the conversation. There is still a slickness to much of what he does, but it can feel spiritless, inert, in its service to the status quo. "What if I just end up back where we started?" he asks on "I'm Spent," his voice bearing a noticeable weariness. "What if I can't take this s*** any farther?" He asks like someone with no interest in knowing the answer.
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