Drake's ICEMAN Is Sixty-Nine Minutes of Rap and Grudge


Eighteen tracks, a producer list eighty names long, three guests and a release date that was hidden inside a block of ice — what Drake's ninth album actually is.

Drake · ICEMAN

15 May 2026 · OVO Sound / Republic Records

Eighteen songs, just under sixty-nine minutes, and a producer list eighty names long. That is the shape of ICEMAN, Drake's ninth studio album: tagged Hip-Hop/Rap, carrying an explicit advisory, out on 15 May 2026. It is one of three Drake albums released that day, alongside Maid of Honour and Habibti, per the Wikipedia entry. The useful question is not whether it's good. It's whether eighteen tracks of Drake rapping is what you came for.

What this actually is

The catalogue date is 15 May 2026, and it's the one worth trusting: the collection carries it, and so does every track but one. The exception is track eleven, "What Did I Miss?", dated 5 July 2025 — it came out as a single nearly a year early, the day after Drake began teasing solo material with a YouTube livestream, per the Wikipedia entry. So this is a 2026 album with a 2025 song buried in the middle of it. That entry also reports the date was announced on 21 April 2026.

Label is a two-source answer. The catalogue's phonographic copyright line reads "℗ 2026 OVO, under exclusive license to Republic Records, a division of UMG Recordings, Inc."; the Wikipedia infobox lists both OVO Sound and Republic Records.

On length the numbers disagree slightly. Adding up the eighteen catalogue runtimes gives 68:40. Apple Music's own page rounds the album to "1 hour 8 minutes". Wikipedia's infobox says 68:51. All three land in the same place — a hair under sixty-nine minutes.

The sequencing has one clear idea in it. Four songs are called "Make Them Something" — "Make Them Cry" at one, "Make Them Pay" at seven, "Make Them Remember" at fourteen, "Make Them Know" at eighteen — spaced as the record's four cornerstones. Four songs run past five minutes; two come in under three.

Guests, from the catalogue's per-track credits: "Ran To Atlanta" is credited to Drake, Future and Molly Santana, and "B's On The Table" to Drake and 21 Savage — the three guests the Wikipedia entry names. It also lists the singles as "What Did I Miss?", "Janice STFU" and "2 Hard 4 the Radio".

What it sounds like

Same honesty problem as always: I can read this record's credits and the writing about it; I can't describe it from the listening chair. Take this as a reading of the paperwork.

The paperwork says a rap album built on borrowed parts and a deep bench. Wikipedia's sample-credits section has "Janice STFU" interpolating Lykke Li's "I Follow Rivers"; "2 Hard 4 the Radio" taking an interpolation from Mac Dre and a sample from SWV's "That's What I Need"; "Make Them Cry" built on Roger Ridley's "Who Am I". Production is handled by regulars including 40, Boi-1da and Tay Keith, per the entry's lead, with Southside, Wheezy, FnZ and Conductor Williams among the names in its infobox.

Reviewers who have heard it describe an argumentative, rap-forward record. Variety's Peter A. Berry, as quoted in the entry, called it "the fun and vindictive comeback record [Drake] needed". Pitchfork's Jayson Greene called it "a long platter of cold, lumpy self-pity". Those are the reviews' words, passed on by the entry, not mine.

Who it's for

For people who want Drake rapping rather than singing. The subject is a grudge and its own reputation: "What Did I Miss?" addresses the fallout from his feud with Kendrick Lamar, and "Make Them Remember" — leaked two days before release as "1AM in Albany" — carries disses at Lamar and LeBron James, per the entry, which also notes that "National Treasures" contains the "Iceman was a nice man" line fans had long joked would turn up.

If you liked Drake in argument mode, this is eighteen tracks of it, with a four-part "Make Them" spine holding the thing together. If you didn't, the runtime decides it. The Sydney Morning Herald's Robert Morgan, per the entry, said "18 tracks of it is exhausting, like you're being subjected to a friend's endless tirades against a co-worker" — a fair warning I can't contradict without hearing the record.

The bottom line

Wikipedia reports a Metacritic weighted average of 51 out of 100 from twelve critics — three positive, eight mixed, one negative — and a first week of 463,000 album-equivalent units in the US, number one on the Billboard 200 and Drake's fifteenth, plus number ones in the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. I haven't seen the underlying sales reporting, so treat those as the entry's claims rather than mine.

What I can say from what I actually pulled: eighteen tracks, three guests across two of them, one 2025 single at eleven, a producer roster you could staff a label with, and four song titles that tell you who they're aimed at. Whether that adds up to a good Drake album depends on how much of the argument you want to sit through.

Sources

Track titles, runtimes, track count, genre, the copyright line and the album date come from the public iTunes catalogue lookup for collection 6769568449, cross-checked against the album's Apple Music listing ("2026 · 18 Songs"). The release history, singles, guests, producer roster, sample credits, review quotations and chart figures come from the Wikipedia article "Iceman (album)". Everything above about how the record sounds is my reading of those credits and quoted reviews, not a listening review.

Track list (18 tracks)

  • 1. Make Them Cry — 5:07
  • 2. Dust — 3:09
  • 3. Whisper My Name — 3:42
  • 4. Janice STFU — 3:57
  • 5. Ran To Atlanta — 4:07
  • 6. Shabang — 3:08
  • 7. Make Them Pay — 5:01
  • 8. Burning Bridges — 3:45
  • 9. National Treasures — 3:20
  • 10. B’s On The Table — 2:17
  • 11. What Did I Miss? — 3:14
  • 12. Plot Twist — 3:15
  • 13. 2 Hard 4 The Radio — 3:03
  • 14. Make Them Remember — 5:23
  • 15. Little Birdie — 2:56
  • 16. Don’t Worry — 4:06
  • 17. Firm Friends — 5:02
  • 18. Make Them Know — 4:08

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