This feels like a big moment for Drake. Not commercially — he remains too enormous for that — but culturally. In the aftermath of his bruising defeat in a war of words with Kendrick Lamar, alongside the ensuing, increasingly messy, legal wrangling, ‘ICEMAN’ and its two surprise companions ‘MAID OF HONOUR’ and ‘HABIBTI’ arrive less like a victory lap than an attempt to drown out the noise through sheer volume.
The problem is that two and a half hours of music only amplifies Drake’s worst instincts. There are flashes of the artist who once made paranoia, insecurity and emotional oversharing feel genuinely addictive, such as Ran to Atlanta, where skeletal trap percussion creates an atmosphere of isolation that suits his increasingly alienated persona.
But, broadly, they’re buried beneath endless self-justification, repetitive score-settling and lyrics so obsessed with streaming disputes and minor betrayals that they often sound like bitter group chat screenshots accidentally uploaded to Spotify.
Of the moments where the old magic flickers back into life, Burning Bridges is a notable peak, its smoky piano and late-night R&B vibe briefly recalling the focused melancholy that made albums like ‘Take Care’ so very compelling and fresh-sounding.
Elsewhere, Which One from ‘MAID OF HONOUR’ almost rescues the project entirely. The production on this Central Cee collaboration finally sounds energised, the hook actually lands and Drake momentarily stops litigating his own public image long enough to make something emotionally coherent.
Unfortunately, too much of the surrounding material feels half-finished or algorithmically assembled. ‘HABIBTI’, in particular, disappears into a blur of AutoTuned mood music, interchangeable melodies and recycled gripes. The strangest thing about the trilogy, though, is how joyless it feels. Even Drake’s self-pity used to be entertaining; now it often resembles a billionaire arguing with strangers in a comments section at 3am.
Double or triple albums can suggest an artist has tapped into an extraordinary creative run: Led Zeppelin’s ‘Physical Graffiti’ is one example and Stevie Wonder’s ‘Songs in the Key of Life’ is another. More recently, and certainly here, there is just the cynicism of a splurge designed to maximise streams and, perhaps, exhaust listeners before anyone has time to ask whether the material was worth releasing in the first place.
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