The image of Drake I could not stop thinking about this weekend comes midway through ICEMAN. On “B’s on the Table,” the rapper is exhausted but not depleted, surrounded by his dogs, his “bitch,” the two-Michelin star personal chef, and fairweather friends eager to text congratulations now that he’s back in the mix. “Sometimes I sit in the parking garage and I talk to my watch or I talk to my whip,” he intones. In all the ways that matter, Drake is alone, alone.

That’s nothing new. Over the past 10 years, Drake has entered rarified air, a popstar amidst rappers and a force amongst popstars. He’s been Teflon and platinum and diamond — even as critics have lambasted his records for diminishing returns — and found himself functionally peerless, no longer competing with anyone, not even himself. Just look at the cover of ICEMAN; Drake’s aiming for the sort of world-bending cultural ubiquity that turned an artist like Michael Jackson into a god among men. Upon release, his three albums that arrived precisely at midnight May 15 promptly broke streaming servers. Anything less would be blasé.

ICEMAN is a good album with flashes of excellence, but it’s not that good. While it’s likely fans will push at least one of these collective 43 songs to the sort of incessant social media omnipresence “NOKIA” enjoyed last year, nothing here is quite so inventive or unguarded as “In My Feelings” or “Too Much.” But this album does exactly what Drake needed it to do: remind people that his power comes from the music first, and Being Drake second. Instead of attempting to centralize his sound and his fans, he’s diversified, stretching himself to deliver a range of music that could hit everywhere from Ibiza to the Bay Area. Alongside slighter offerings, MAID OF HONOUR (okay) and HABIBTI (bomb), ICEMAN (solid) presents a vision for how Drake’s music might fit into the weave of our lives right now, offering up a version of Aubrey for every playlisting niche available.

Getting to that point with these three records has necessitated reflection, humility, and a general shift in posture. Drake remains the biggest rapper out, but two years on, he can admit he lost the beef, badly. He’s still assured he’ll win the war (if he hasn’t done so already by virtue of not dying), but jettisoning the ill-advised defensiveness of “The Heart Part VI” and “GIMME A HUG” makes that confidence aspirational rather than absurd. Crucially, this candor cracks open the Iceman’s armor, if only a little, and these glimpses of pain and paranoia ground Drake’s current position in an earnest humanity.

Part of why Kendrick Lamar walked away with such a big win two years ago was a broader cultural resentment toward Drake hegemony; people might love a winner, but they rarely love them forever. Drake’s as cocky as ever on ICEMAN, but repositions himself as an underdog by shifting focus away from other celebrities to the record labels that pull strings behind the scenes. Whether or not listeners believe his theories about Universal Music Group and botted streams, they give Drake a villain to rail against and snipe at on wax, to remind us that despite his personal plane, cryptocurrency holdings, gambling partnerships, and the mansion so big he calls it The Embassy, he is still an artist under capitalism, tangled up in the industry as much as Taylor Swift and Justin Bieber.

On first listen, ICEMAN feels like business as usual: a fine-tuned blend of moody set pieces and mid-tempo resentment raps, interspersed with soaring synths and trap-influenced bangers. But Drake’s pettiest impulses are sharpened to a hilariously cutting edge. These songs are funny, breezy, and endlessly listenable, and you find yourself wishing ICEMAN had more of them. In the end, too much of the album is given to moody tracks where he explores, however shallowly, the fallout from his beef with Kendrick Lamar. Where the myriad Drakes we know and love might have coexisted on previous albums, in 2026 companion albums MAID OF HONOUR and HABIBTI serve as key flankers.

Over the weekend, I was looping the visualizer for “B’s on the Table” where we see soaring views of the CN Tower dominating the skyline, but also levitating shots from the tower’s interior, panning lovingly over the arterial tangle of pipes and wires within. The lifeblood of a Toronto icon. At a pivotal moment in his career, it makes perfect sense that he’d recenter on his origins. That’s where legacies begin.