Drake Delivers His Most Disappointing Music Yet On “ICEMAN,” “HABIBTI,” & “MAID OF HONOUR”: Album Reviews
Drake’s first full-length statements since the end of the biggest rap battle in a quarter century are overstuffed and undercooked.
The last two years have been anything but quiet for Drake. Since the end of the most highly publicized feud in hip-hop history (which, of course, culminated in Kendrick Lamar’s performance at Super Bowl LIX), he’s spent that time doing two very distinct things. First, he started (and stopped) the rollout for ICEMAN, his ninth solo studio album, launching a web series of the same name, where he previewed different singles and showed off the city of Toronto.
Second, and more importantly, Drake sued Universal Music Group and Spotify, massive music corporations that have pumped millions of dollars and thousands of hours into ensuring that he became (and stayed) the biggest rapper alive for the better part of the last 15 years. He initially filed a petition claiming that the two companies conspired to artificially inflate the metrics for Lamar’s mega-hit “Not Like Us” via several forms of payola, before retracting that initial petition and filing a lawsuit that described the scathing diss track as defamatory. The suit was dismissed in late 2025 after the court determined that the track was a form of “non-actionable opinion,” meaning that the allegations were too broad to be proven one way or another.
Of course, the lawsuit’s dismissal did not stop Drake from stewing over his feud with Lamar, and on May 15, fans received the results of his festering anger, as he finally delivered ICEMAN, following an awkward final act to his rollout that included the installation of a massive ice sculpture in downtown Toronto that authorities had to melt almost as quickly as it was installed because of it being a massive safety hazard.
However, it was not the only album that Drake dropped that day, as he actually re-emerged with not one, but three releases. ICEMAN is a hip-hop album with essentially no singing of any kind. MAID OF HONOUR is another dance album in a similar vein as his 2022 release, Honestly, Nevermind. HABIBTI is an R&B album. That’s 43 new songs across three new albums, which runs for a total of nearly three full hours. That’s a lot of new music for any artist, let alone Drake, whose work has been largely subpar to bad for much of the last decade. Ultimately, the only thing these 43 songs did was make me less interested in Drake’s music than I was a little over two weeks ago.
Drake’s never been a particularly excellent singer, but his voice on Thank Me Later, Take Care, and Nothing Was the Same conveyed a feeling of sincerity. On any of the singing tracks across these three new albums, no amount of pitch correction can save his voice from being the most grating and unemotive it has ever been, particularly on HABIBTI, which may be the most uninspired album of Drake’s entire career.
The lack of vocal depth is exacerbated by the lyrical content being equally poor. “Running out of sodas, I might walk to Circle K by myself,” he sleepily croons on “Fortworth,” the latest collaboration with PARTYNEXTDOOR in a series of songs (and albums) that seem to exist solely for Drake to play into his most frustrating artistic impulses.
“Slap The City” features a beat that sounds like a leftover from Aaliyah’s One in a Million sessions. With that in mind, it’s likely not a coincidence that London-based singer Qendresa sings the hook very similarly to how Aaliyah may have done it, though it lacks the personality that the real Aaliyah possessed, instead feeling hollow.
Both MAID OF HONOUR and HABIBTI include Sexyy Red features. “Hurrr Nor Thurrr” appears on the latter, and it’s yet another empty collaboration between two people who should not have as much music together as they do. “Cheetah Print” appears on the former, and I struggle to understand who this song, and MAID OF HONOUR broadly speaking, are meant to appeal to.
It’s clear from the repetitive hook (“I’ll smack that ass until I leave a print / “I’ll smack that ass until it’s cheetah print”), beat that comes across as something that Beyoncé probably cut from Renaissance, and Sexyy Red’s mind-boggling decision to interpolate DJ Casper’s “Cha Cha Slide” on the second half of the track, that “Cheetah Print” was created with the goal of being a club anthem in mind. However, club anthems usually have to have something resembling energy for them to actually get played in the club, and the monotonous way in which he delivers these lyrics simply does not work.
“Cheetah Print,” and MAID OF HONOUR as an entire project, does not come across as the creation of someone who enjoys dance music as a genre. I felt the same way about Honestly, Nevermind, Drake’s first foray into exploring the sounds of house music. Considering Honestly, Nevermind released so closely to the aforementioned Renaissance, comparing the two felt natural. Though the two albums were dramatic departures from anything they’d given fans in the past, Renaissance felt, and still feels, much more earnest than any of the comatose performances Drake put forth on his album. MAID OF HONOUR feels about as sleepy as Honestly, Nevermind did.
In a time where acts like Rochelle Jordan, PinkPantheress, Tinashe, and Sudan Archives, as well as Drake’s A-list peers like The Weeknd and Beyoncé, have made some of the most exciting dance music of the decade, why would I ever want to relisten to an album with none of the charm or careful construction as others made by more dynamic artists? It’s disappointing to hear an artist with as many resources as Drake continue to make apathetic-sounding albums in this lane instead of doing something significant. And that disappointment is also what I feel when listening to ICEMAN.
One may think that two years would be enough time for Drake to reflect on his role in the biggest rap battle of all time and create a piece of art with emotional depth and self-awareness, something his music has grown to lack at an increased rate as he’s grown from an underdog (of sorts) into a dynasty unto himself. Instead, ICEMAN sees Drake hit back at almost all of his most frequent targets.
He accuses Kendrick Lamar of botting his streams, tells A$AP Rocky to kill himself (and mocks Rihanna for not posting any of Rocky’s music during the Don’t Be Dumb rollout), implies that Jay-Z was “island hopping” with Jeffrey Epstein (referencing an unverified anonymous tip to the FBI in which Jay and Pusha T were accused of participating in a sex trafficking ring), and calls out DJ Khaled for not issuing a public show of support for Palestine. It’s whiny and unbecoming of a rapper trying to re-assert himself at the top of the game after such a hit to his public perception.
Beyond his vendettas, Drake has seemingly lost the ability to write a coherent verse over the last few years. Scary Hours 3, the EP he released shortly after 2023’s For All the Dogs, features his most polished rapping in years. Upon its release, I kept finding myself returning to it because of just how different the EP is in comparison to his other output this decade.
There’s none of that with ICEMAN. Not only does the album lack lyrical consistency (which is mirrored on the production side by the ridiculous number of beat switches across the project), it features several of the weakest punchlines I can remember hearing on a Drake album. “I’m greater than everybody like some shredded cheese,” “Some TLC s**t ‘cause, my n***a, you gon’ need a chilly ice pack for your left eye,” and “I’m with Noel like I’m Kris Kringle” are all lines he delivers here, and those don’t even begin to scratch the surface. “Ironic, cause the ICEMAN was a nice man; now I’m hot and cold.” Really? Over the last 15 years, detractors have regularly accused him of writing lines with the goal of being used for Instagram captions, and I’m not sure there’s ever been a Drake album that’s proven those people more correct.
In addition to his poor lyrical output, the beats are also dry, though there are occasional moments of reprieve, namely “Make Them Pay” and its sample of “Free” by Deniece Williams, as well as the first half of “National Treasures.” Based on the production credits, there was not nearly enough of 40 on this album, as Drake’s longest-tenured and most frequent collaborator has routinely delivered some of the strongest beats in mainstream hip-hop since the start of their partnership nearly two decades ago.
MAID OF HONOUR, HABIBTI, and ICEMAN are quite unfortunate. Drake’s failure to meet the moment after the battle is not only the result of his own regression as a musician and his insistence on oversaturating the market with a lot of music instead of enjoyable music but also an apparent disinterest in genuine self-reflection.
I did not go into any of the three albums hoping for them to be as lacking in quality as they are, but there was little to nothing across these releases that I found myself being able to sink my teeth into beyond the jabs at everyone on ICEMAN. No matter how many records he breaks or how frequently he uses Michael Jackson’s iconography, the reality is that his output has not justified being put in some of the discussions he’s landed in. Jackson and Madonna, two of his closest contemporaries by the statistics, have all-time great discographies to accompany the millions upon millions of records they’ve sold. And with these latest albums, Drake is further away from all-time great talks than he’s ever been. What a shame.
ICEMAN rating: 1.5/5
MAID OF HONOUR rating: 1.5/5
HABIBTI rating: 1/5