Despite his A-list pop star status, there’s been a noticeable scrappiness to Drake’s rollout for his ninth album, Iceman. Last month, the rapper iced out his favorite court-side seats at the Toronto Raptors’ arena, with faux icicles dangling from the chairs. He followed that up with a more brazen stunt: a huge block of ice in downtown Toronto for the public to chip at until it thawed, revealing the album date. In early May, he debuted a quirky episodic series on YouTube featuring skits in an ice manufacturing plant and the rapper driving an Iceman-branded truck around Toronto. The mood seemed cheeky and defiant: good news for anyone who missed the memester of his 2016 viral hit Hotline Bling.

It has been an eventful and complicated time for Drake since his most recent solo studio album, 2023’s For All the Dogs. While he is still the highest streamed rapper artist in the world, he has been attacked by hip-hop. Two years ago, Compton rapper Kendrick Lamar and Drake engaged in a battle that no one came out of unscathed. There were accusations of intimate partner violence towards Lamar, a song about a possible daughter that Drake has hid, and Lamar’s Grammy-winning death blow – Not Like Us – about Drake being a hip-hop “colonizer” who chases after young women. Consensus has said that he lost the beef between him and Lamar, and the consensus is right, but the backlash against Drake was already starting to formulate before Lamar issued the first warning shot in 2024 diss track Like That.

Fans that once loved Drake for his undeniable hooks and sensual R&B sensibilities jumped to Lamar’s side as Drake’s music began to feel more lonely and bitter, while Lamar showed himself to be surprisingly nimble during the beef. Drake had previously charmed audiences with his light-heartedness – as recently as 2021, he dressed up as a B-movie action star and Harlequin romance hero in his Way 2 Sexy video – but this time he was the butt of a joke that he wasn’t in on. A carnival of distrust and innuendo made the battle with Lamar both potent and excessive. Drake wasn’t being evaluated in the context of the beef, or the music of the beef; and opinions flooded in based on the once-muted suspicions of him being a culture vulture.

It was a 180 turn for an artist who had previously been widely embraced. “He essentially came out the gate appealing to women,” said music critic and The Motherlode author Clover Hope. “He leaned into the ‘sing-songy mixtape Drake’ that got him notoriety, [with] songs like Jungle or others that had Aaliyah samples.” Hope remembers that women were some of Drake’s first supporters around the release of his 2009 mixtape So Far Gone. “What we first appreciated about Drake was he made it clear that rap was for women,” explains Hope. “I think about LL Cool J and how he made space for that, targeting women’s ears. For me and my friend group, he was magnetic.”

When Drake debuted, some self-appointed gatekeepers thought that he wasn’t hip-hop enough, or wasn’t good enough at technical lyricism to warrant his fame. It never stopped Drake from combining his passion for southern rap maximalism with his R&B sensibilities, but in recent years it has seemed like he may have internalized the critiques from hypermasculine rap fans about the lack of agitation in his music and persona.

The misogyny on 2022’s collaboration album with 21 Savage, Her Loss, takes up so much space that it could have been focused group by Andrew Tate fans. As well as appearing on Tate admirer Adin Ross’s podcast and recording lonely ads for crypto casino Stake, he was compared to an incel after giving $50,000 to a fan who was dumped by his girlfriend. His lyrics began to feel ever more bitter and calculated: in the 2022 track Circo Loco, he seemed to make fun of Megan Thee Stallion’s 2020 shooting with the line, “this bitch lie bout getting shots but she’s still a Stallion.” For many female fans, it was the final straw. “If you were on the fence about still being a fan of his as a woman, that line was something where it was like ‘I really can’t get behind this,’” remarked Hope, who said she wants to hear an apology for that line or his friendship with Megan’s attacker, Tory Lanez.

In recent years, Drake has also found it increasingly difficult to bend the line between melodic songs and rapping with the fluidity that used to be his signature. Now, he’s either only singing or only rapping, as his music has become digestible and hollow. He is still capable of a hit: the 2025 single Nokia was light-hearted and winking in a way that evoked his early hits like Fancy, but its release was overshadowed by Lamar’s victorious Super Bowl half-time performance, which was just weeks before. Drake has a chance to change the narrative with Iceman. He doesn’t need to talk about the beef, but it would take a willingness to be honest about his place in the culture right now. I would be intrigued if Drake were to make his version of Taylor Swift’s Reputation, or a statement about what it’s like being an overly criticized rap star. I’m just not sure that he has it in him.

• Iceman is out on 15 May