Drake, at a Precipice

The numbers will be there regardless. But artistically, this album feels like an inflection point.

I said I wasn’t going to do an ICEMAN preview piece because I pretty much did that last year. But a lot has happened since then. Namely, he’s reinvigorated anticipation for the album with an ICEMAN installation, and just the right amount of ominous Instagram stories to feed fan anticipation. Last night, “1AM in Albany,” “3PM in New Orleans, “ and a full version of “Super Maxx,” which debuted on one of his ICEMAN streams, leaked. Did a hacker leak them, or was Drake employing his strategy of unofficially releasing a song before claiming it? There are more questions than answers surrounding the project, which arrives under the black cloud of an ongoing lawsuit with UMG.

Drake has always done well at a savvy album rollout. In the midst of dropping his ICEMAN livestream episodes, he told Complex, “What I hate is the redundancy of this formulaic approach that’s ingrained in our brains from early label days. Single, video, single, video, album cover post, etc.” He and 21 Savage subverted the typical rollout a couple of years ago with a fake Vogue Cover and a Howard Stern interview. And in the past year, he’s done that with the Adam Kaprow and Matt Adams-inspired Iceman installation, as well as the livestreams that featured him being stalked by a Pinochio character that seems to reference his nemesis, Kendrick Lamar. Even the title ICEMAN, polarizing in the era of mass deportation, has sparked memage like Kevin Durant posting digital renders of himself frozen.