Toward the beginning of his new song “Janice STFU,” Drake conducts one of his customary exercises in emo theater: “You say what my work means to me will one day be the death of me / They tried to kill me once, but, darling, you just resurrected me.” It feels melodramatic, but this time, it’s fair enough. After all, someone winning song and record of the year Grammys for calling you a pedophile before performing that same diss track at the Super Bowl is as close to a codified cultural assassination as any pop star can get.
That’s obviously the situation Drake faced following Kendrick Lamar’s “Not Like Us,” a hilarious, incisive character takedown that sent Drake to the graveyard for rappers we learned to underappreciate. But there’s a plot twist: Drake never actually kicked the bucket, and, by making him an underdog for the first time since his halcyon days as a mixtape rapper, Lamar positioned him to make a spectacular comeback.
That comeback would be “Iceman,” the album he’s been teasing since August 2024, when “Not Like Us” was still ringing off across barbecues, baby showers and rooftop parties across the country. The question on everyone’s mind in the lead-up to the project was whether it would be strong enough to wash off the stench of the rap battle and subsequent lawsuit with Universal Music Group. And while it does fall short of spectacular, it succeeds as a vindication, a dexterous if bloated project that also arrived alongside two surprise albums, “Habibti” and “Maid of Honour.”
