Photo by Carmen Mandato/Getty Images
At 10:45 p.m. on Thursday night, I was sitting on my couch with YouTube open on my TV. On the screen was a livestream of Drake’s Iceman 4 (now privated), the latest part of his album rollout that he’d teased earlier that morning. I had clicked it on a whim, and was shocked to discover that he was debuting the new music, right then and there, over an hour early with full visuals to match. My friend, who was in the kitchen, recognized his laconic drawl, complained, and sat next to me to watch too; we were transfixed. We argued about the beats and the lyrics: he hated most of it, I begrudgingly liked some; I predicted the hits; we sat through the whole thing. At the end, when Drake revealed that three new albums — Iceman, Habibti, and Maid of Honor — were coming at midnight instead of just one, I had to play it back just to confirm I’d heard correctly, even though the nearly half a million people who were also watching were already spamming the news in the YouTube live chat. “I’ll give it to Drake,” my friend said. “He knows how to do a rollout.”
In the hours since the records' release — and the rapper subsequently breaking both Apple Music and Spotify at midnight (which, according to a cursory Google search, hasn’t happened to anyone besides Taylor Swift in recent years) — I’ve been thinking about what other artist could've gotten me to stay up on YouTube for an album. Not many names come to mind.
It’s true that there was a genuine and unique, anticipatory newsworthiness around this release; as cited by many music critics, Iceman was poised to be a major inflection point in his career and reputation. As his first major release back from "losing" the great 2025 rap feud, there were actual stakes at hand. But there’s also something innate about Drake that’s always provoked abnormal amounts of intrigue.
Like the rapper himself, the Iceman rollout, which had been going on for the greater part of a year, had been over-the-top and annoying. Drake first alluded to the title, Iceman, as early back as August 2024, posting a screenshot of a folder called “2.0 – Iceman.” Iceman episode 1 dropped July 4, 2025, alongside the first single, “What Did I Miss.” The real show kicked off in earnest in March when he posted memes properly teasing the release — then Drake broke the fourth wall and everything went off the rails.
He covered his courtside seats at a Toronto Raptors game with ice. A massive, ridiculous, ice block structure was erected outside of the Bond Hotel in Toronto with the album’s release date sealed inside, a stunt that felt like it was masterminded by a less-evil Jigsaw. Streamers pulled up with flamethrowers. In less than a day, a piece of paper was freed from the ice. I absolutely rolled my eyes when these posts took over my Instagram but secretly... I was also entertained?
Say what you want about Drake (this very publication certainly has) but music needs someone like him right now. A hateable target is one way to look at it; more generously, Drake’s an incredible showman. A real, shameless diva. Someone who, for some reason, feels they’re at a disadvantage going into every music release and will go to desperate measures to do everything they can to draw attention to themselves. This may have been genuinely the case for Drake going into Iceman, but this quality has defined him since way before this moment, really. In 2016, journalist Leon Neyfakh remarked in his FADER cover story of the rapper that the hate he received online felt “tailor-made” for the rapper; he was a target, “the kind of cultural giant who inspires love and derision in equal measure.” For Drake, he processed that by doing things like giving out thousands of dollars to strangers on the street for a music video in 2018, years before Mr. Beast made it gauche to do so. Annoying. Ballsy.
Unfortunately, that ballsyness is rare today. In the contemporary streaming era, the standardization of album releases (when, exactly, did everyone agree on Friday as the release day) and the general devaluation of music has made everything extremely predictable and terribly dull. Most major artists prefer the nonchalant, subtle rollout of deleting their whole Instagram grid and then perfectly curating what follows; fans don’t just get one album cover anymore, they get 20. Nothing is mysterious, weird, worth taking a deeper look at. If we’re lucky, someone with major cachet like Justin Bieber will surprise-drop an album, but even that tactic isn’t as novel as it once was. Every release suffers from the same disquieting sense of anticlimacticness that the New Yorker’s Brady Brickner Wood said “even a very good” album has trouble shaking.
Except, Drake now might be the exception — and with a album(s) that might not even be “very good” (my colleague Vivian Medithi will be the judge of that one). The public will be the judge and jury of that. But at least the public is talking for once, together, in one moment, like we used to. In the end I believe that just like battling the onslaught of AI sameness, the music industry needed someone human, insane, and truly unhinged to break simulation. Maybe it’s not Drake we wanted, but it’s Drake we got.
