Breaking down Drake's Temu haul of an album drop

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“Iceman” has cometh — and then some.After spending the better part of a year teasing his first solo album since 2023 — and his first, more importantly, since losing the epic rap battle that climaxed with Kendrick Lamar’s “Not Like Us” — Drake finally dropped “Iceman” late Thursday along with two other albums whose existence took much of the world by surprise: “Maid of Honour” and “Habibti.”Together, the three LPs comprise 43 new songs from the Toronto-born rapper and singer who’s been searching for a path back to the pop-cultural perch he occupied for much of the 2010s.To assess his progress, The Times’ Mikael Wood and August Brown took a preliminary listen then exchanged some thoughts.MIKAEL WOOD: Well, August, to paraphrase the most psychotic track from the Kendrick-and-Drake beef: Meet the many Grahams.

Early signs suggested that “Iceman” would constitute a return to Drake’s tough-talking ways in the wake of his humiliating defeat, and indeed that’s largely what the album delivers over plush yet hard-hitting beats.Yet with “Maid of Honour” and “Habibti,” the 39-year-old born Aubrey Graham is also showcasing his other dominant modes: globe-tripping dance-music hedonist (on the former) and callow-sensitive R&B lover boy (on the latter).Clearly, the sheer volume and breadth of music here is meant to serve as a kind of shock-and-awe campaign designed to jolt us back to a time when Drake seemed to rule over not just hip-hop but all of pop music.

(Don’t forget that 2018’s “Scorpion” contained 25 tracks.)What do you make of his super-sizing effort here? Does it speak of an overflow of creativity — or of an inability to edit? We should say that Drake’s guests on the albums include 21 Savage, Central Cee, Sexyy Red, Popcaan and Future, the last of whom appears on “Iceman” in a song called “Ran to Atlanta” — a cl...