Drake’s upcoming ninth studio album, Iceman, is his first solo project since his now infamous (and litigious) war of words with Kendrick Lamar last spring. In a move that isn’t terribly surprising for Drake circa 2025, he’s turned the album’s rollout into a multi-part livestream that looks and feels as if Kai Cenat was produced by A24. The visuals are packed with symbolism and Easter eggs, unfolding like the sum of the types of thrillers Drake posts to his Instagram Story. A little of Eyes Wide Shut’s secret underworlds, a bit of Magnolia’s heady suspense. Some of the high drama of Euphoria, produced by Drake’s company, DreamCrew, too, of course. Every episode is prefaced by a post from Drake’s Instagram announcing the time of the stream. In each of the three we’ve gotten so far, Drake premiered a new single: “What Did I Miss?” in episode one, “Which One,” featuring Central Cee in episode two, and most recently, “Dog House,” with Julia Wolf and Yeat.
For all of the drama, the streams have managed to put together a narrative that is oddly entertaining. This is Drake’s best attempt at intricate narrative storytelling, and so far it’s landed as well as one could hope. If you’ve ever sat through a somewhat decent Netflix series just to get to the end, you could probably get into Drake’s Iceman rollout. Beyond using the streams to release new singles, the episodes progress through a mysterious narrative featuring a growing number of Pinnochios chasing Drake around the world. What could it all mean? Inquiring minds, of course, are hungry for any insight into how Drake actually feels about not only Kendrick but his own collaborators, who also took part in the beef, as well as what he could be thinking with his lawsuit against UMG. There’s also the question of where this leaves Drake’s career and legacy. Anything he releases has to address the elephant in the room.
Drake, of course, has chosen the mysterious route. To his credit, the streams so far have given fans a lot to unpack, as well as a trove of new snippets and hints of what sound like some very good raps from Drake. Here’s a quick breakdown of all of the easter eggs so far in Drake’s Iceman live streams.
Episode One
In the first episode, Drake brings us along to a mysterious ice factory in his home city of Toronto. It’s a decidedly blue collar locale, and Drake is dressed for the part, adorned in a workwear coat and jeans. Thematically, this episode is awash in the color blue itself, which many fans interpret as symbolizing coldness and detachment from the music industry.
Wordless, Drake walks throughout the shop, at one point measuring a block of ice, before landing in the break room. Inside, on a boxy old tv, vintage clips of Drake early on in his career appear on screen. Like his 100 Gigs drop shortly after his beef with Kendrick last year, he’s able to invoke the scale of his own history. In the breakroom, we see a clip from 2006 previewing “City is Mine,” from his second mixtape, Comeback Season. The footage includes a clip of Drake walking through Toronto’s famous Dundas Square as a relative unknown, and one of him opening for Ice Cube, and a show for which he earned $100.
He uses these bits of nostalgia in a way that sets the stakes for the coming project. The idea is that Drake’s legacy is on the line with this coming project. (The word “legacy” explicitly shows up in later episodes.) Following the vintage clips, we get the music video for “What Did I Miss?” as close to the rousing comeback track that Drake might be hoping for. The song debuted at #2 on the Hot 100 and functions as a formidable response to the year of disses he faced. In the music video, Drake is at his Texas mansion, the 313-acre property he purchased in 2023 for $15 million that sits right outside of Houston, a city that molded the early parts of his career. He presents himself as war-ready, flanked by rows of guns pointed at each other, symbolizing the betrayals he chews over in the song. “Last time I looked to my right, you niggas was standing beside me,” he raps. “How can some people I love hang around pussies who try me?”
After the video plays, Drake is back, driving around town in an ice truck listening to unreleased snippets, including one allegedly called “Supermax,” where Drake raps, “Do not come around the guys playin’ peacemaker/They snaked me for now, but we’ll see later.” Here, he alludes to the fractured friendships in his life, including with NBA legend LeBron James, who’s been on Drake’s enemies list ever since he was seen at Kendrick Lamar’s Pop Out concert, and after several clips emerged of him dancing to “Not Like Us.” For his part, LeBron remains diplomatic, recently telling Complex’s Speedy Morman that he “Always wish him the best. Obviously, um, different places right now, currently. He’s doing his thing, I’m doing mine. But it’s always love, for sure.”
As Drake drives through town in his Iceman truck, a few trolls come up to the van and yell “Drake’s a bitch!” to which he responds: “So what then, big dog? Don’t look away now, pussy.” In the streaming world, this is known as “stream sniping,” where fans decipher a streamer’s location and track them down. The stream ends with an official announcement that Iceman is on the way. The ending credits introduce the Pinocchio motif present throughout the series. The letter ‘i’ in the message is refigured as the head of the mythical wooden figure known for lying. The theme hearkens back to his final track in the beef, “The Heart Pt. 6,” where he makes the argument that his disses were based on facts while Kendrick’s — including the “Certified Pedophile” heard round the world — were lies. The symbolism isn’t particularly subtle, but it does the job.
Episode Two
For the second installment of the Iceman streams, we’re in London at the historic Victoria Baths. This time, we’re awash in greens meant to represent money, of course, but also the figurative “Green-eyed monster,” classically a symbol of jealousy, which Drake has claimed is what fueled all of the industry turning against him. This episode premiered shortly after Drake’s takeover of Wireless Festival, where he brought out everyone from Lauryn Hill to Vanessa Carlton. It continues the highly cinematic aesthetic of the streams, featuring lush shots of the palatial locale, which seems to be inhabited solely by Drizzy at the moment. Episode 2 brings us our first guest in the series, Central Cee, who first appears along with Drake walking through the streets of London before we’re back at the Victoria Baths overlooking a sprawling, empty pool. Some fans online have speculated that the pool is a nod to Kendrick Lamar’s single “Swimming Pools,” the hidden message being that Drake has “emptied” Kendrick’s pool. It’s worth taking with a grain of salt.
Drake and Cench premiere the second official release from the Iceman streams, “Which One,” a club-ready tune that leans into many of the things Drake does well. Rather than taking jabs at his enemies, Drake is in a lighter mood, gravitating towards the Caribbean-infused sounds that made for some of his best work. Meanwhile, Central Cee, by now one of Drake’s most consistently exciting collaborators, continues to shine. For the song’s visuals, the two stand above the empty swimming pool as a woman dances at the center. It’s all very ominous given how upbeat the song itself is.
Also, throughout the episode, we see those dang Pinnochios, first scribbled on a door, which there seem to be dozens of in this episode, symbolizing perhaps exposing secrets or, as some sleuths have pointed out, the fact that in the Pinocchio film adaptations, doors represent traps that prey on Pinocchio’s desire for fame. We also see an actual Pinocchio lurking menacingly in the bushes. Beyond the animated cartoon rendering teased in episode 1, Iceman episode 2 leans into the surreal, with an actual little Pinocchio figure chasing Drake around the city of London. At the end of the episode, having narrowly escaped being chased, Drake enters an elevator as an instrumental plays in the background. Just when you’d expect his verse to start, the music cuts out. The song in question happened to be “National Treasure,” which a pair of live-streaming teens would later leak as a way of hyping up their meme coin.
Episode Three
The most recent installment of Drake’s streams is without a doubt the most densely packed, and it’s the longest one so far, clocking in at over 90 minutes. The stream opens with audio of the Italian song “Parole Parole” by Mina, undoubtedly a cryptic Easter egg alluding to the allegations brought forth in last year’s beef. The song’s chorus is all about “empty words.” We see Drake, carrying the same backpack from episode 2, walking through stores and cafes in Milan, Italy — where he was on tour at the time — before he sits in the stands of a court where a group of men are playing bocce ball and picks up the phone to call Yeat, who appears in a split frame.
Yeat joins him in another room, handing over what appears to be a file or document. Drake then heads outside into a car, where he begins playing a snippet of a new song where he’s still clearly fuming over the past year’s beef. “All those summers of slappers you owe me,” he raps, ushering in a beat switch that finds him riffing on how “they been talkin since 2008.” From the car, Drake then plays a second track that appears to be a freestyle featuring a moody, lo-fi jerk-inspired beat, where we hear him muse on the fact that he “aint even know how bad they wanna see me go.”
The stream transitions to an instrumental, where “Parole Parole” is sampled on a beat featuring stuttering drums and peak Drake-style hi-hats, before it becomes silent, and we’re in an Italian restaurant, draped in red — a color meant to signify danger and confrontation. Four Pinocchio characters enter the room and take their seats as the instrumental starts to play louder. A server comes in and places a cube of ice on each of their plates. A tray of red paint is left at the edge of the table, and one of the Pinnochios writes the word “Legacy” on the white tablecloth, before they each toss their ice cubes onto the table and leave their seats, and the server comes in and dumps a whole bucket of ice on the scrawled letters. As in episode 1, Drake alludes to the stakes of this next project, which is preserving his legacy in music after his name was associated with
In the next scene, a young woman, possibly the singer Julia Wolf, appears in a similarly red-tinged room and gives Drake a hug before he launches into snippets of new upbeat, club-ready songs. After running through a few song clips, he’s back in the car, where he debuts his new song featuring Cash Cobain, “Somebody Loves Me Pt. 2.” Not long after, we see Drake in what appears to be an Italian courtroom, once again draped in dramatic reds. He’s surrounded by robed spectators, before a Pinocchio figure appears. Many have taken this to represent his current lawsuit against UMG, where Drake claims the label promoted defamatory claims against him in Kendrick Lamar’s song “Not Like Us.”
Drake quickly scrambles out of the room and heads to the club, where he debuts “his”Dog House,” featuring Julia Wolf and Yeat. The song opens with Wolf’s enchanting vocals delivering a thinly veiled jab at Drake’s opponents. “Chew me up and spit me out / Big dog loves a crowd,” she sings. “Well, tell ’em to search my house /I bet they find you face down.” Wolf recently told Rolling Stone that when Drake heard the verse, he immediately related to it, which fits Drake’s whole vibe these days. At the end of the stream, Drake confronts three Pinocchio figures before the screen cuts to the title page, featuring an inscribed tribute to the late designer Giorgio Armani, who passed away on the day the stream aired.
There’s no word yet on when Episode 4 is supposed to drop, but Drake has left us with quite the cliffhanger. What the heck are these Pinochios up to, and what does it all mean?
