“Drake is looking to chart dominance to turn the page on one of the most infamous rap battles in music history,” said Ethan Millman in The Hollywood Reporter. Two weeks ago, the Canadian singer-rapper surprised even his fans when he released not one but three albums in a single day, bidding to become the first artist since Michael Jackson to simultaneously hold the first three slots on Billboard’s album chart. It’s impossible not to read the move as Drake’s response to his decisive loss to Kendrick Lamar in a 2024 rap beef that culminated with Lamar enlisting an entire Super Bowl halftime audience to join him in slurring Drake as a pedophile. Drake has sued over the accusation while now daring to tie himself to Jackson, even creating an album cover that shows a hand wearing one of the crystal-covered gloves that once belonged to the deceased accused pedophile. None of this fully makes sense, except that the album rollout is pushback, and whenever people debate who this century’s greatest rapper is, the argument for Drake “goes down to his pure commercial dominance.”
Drake’s three-album onslaught “does more than attempt a comeback,” said Jeff Ihaza in Rolling Stone. “It takes on the Herculean task of reframing the argument entirely.” On the tracks “Ran to Atlanta” and “2 Hard 4 the Radio,” both on the lead album, Iceman, the 39-year-old adopts Atlanta and West Coast sounds so effectively that he upends Lamar’s authenticity diss: that a mixed-race, middle-class rapper from Toronto had no business in the game. Meanwhile, Drake reignites at least a dozen beefs, comparing Lamar to Muggsy Bogues, the shortest NBA player ever, and lashing out at Jay-Z, A$AP Rocky, Dr. Dre, DJ Khaled, and even LeBron James. Across the record’s 69 minutes, though, “the bickering feels tedious.” Better is Habibti, an 11-song album that “finds Drake in romantic territory, embracing the R&B lover boy that audiences first came to love.” Meanwhile, the groove-centric Maid of Honour is “his strongest work since More Life,” released in 2017. From “Hoe Phase” on, Maid of Honour finds Drake “engaging deeply with niche Black regional sounds” and converting those sounds into so many bangers that the borrowing he’s been slagged for is “reframed as a form of cultural fluency.”
“Say what you want about Drake, but music needs someone like him right now,” said Steffanee Wang in The Fader. “A hateable target is one way to look at it; more generously, Drake’s an incredible showman.” No matter how high he ranks among the most streamed artists in the world—third behind Bad Bunny and Taylor Swift—he always acts as if he’s an underdog who needs to go nuclear when he releases solo music. And the strategy works. “Maybe it’s not Drake we wanted, but it’s Drake we got,” and “at least the public is talking for once, together, like we used to.”