Drake’s Iceman album might be dropping sooner than anyone thought—either because he’s in the endgame of what’s been an increasingly bizarre rollout…or because its release date is now out of Drake’s control, thanks to a group of anarchic streamers.
Over the weekend a new snippet of a song Drake teased recently started floating around; Drake only formally previewed the instrumental, but this latest clip featured some actual bars. Some of the lines are a little hard to make out, though, because a bunch of dipshit teens are talking over the audio. The voices turned out to belong to Bagwork, an anonymous squad of reportedly-teenage streamers with the manic energy of Project X extras. They claim to have gotten their hands on Drake’s Iceman files, and are threatening to leak more of them, if not the full album.
When Drake called into his good friend Adin Ross’s livestream to ask what Bagwork’s deal is—in brief, they’re apparently pumping a memecoin, also called $BAGWORK, and this stunt is part of that—he sounded audibly annoyed at the situation, and even more peeved by Ross’s suggestion that Drake was in on it. That was all the hype the Bagwork boys needed; in one clip they suggest they want to get Drake “even more pissed off.”
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Of course, despite Drake’s protestations, it is very (highly, even) likely that he is in on it. The argument is compelling: Drake, both for financial reasons (given his deal with Stake) and as part of his misguided over-embrace of youth culture, is a friend of the streamer, from Ross to Kai Cenat (sometimes, maybe not at this moment) to xQc. So much so that the main gimmick of the rollout for his impending ninth solo album Iceman has largely revolved around episodic livestreams with a loose narrative concerning Drake evading people (in Pinocchio suits, don’t ask) who want to relieve him of a mysterious bag, contents unknown. And Drake isn’t above staging a viral stunt—remember the flip-flop drone? Sadly, it’s more likely that we’ll learn Bagwork are the Pinocchios than it is that a bunch of dipshit kids hacked the files Drake’s been recording on the go during his Eurotrip tour.
The other, more depressingly cynical way to read this is Drake trying to have his cake and eat it too by field testing the response to “leaked” tracks to see what sticks and what doesn’t, following mixed reception to his three Iceman singles and other loosies he’s officially teased thus far.
On the other hand, while your mileage on Drake’s acting skills may vary—he’s often solid but still very clearly “acting,” in my opinion—he sounds believably annoyed on the phone with Adin Ross, as exasperated as any imminently-39-year-old man might be while trying to get a 24-year-old goofball to take something seriously.
But for anyone wondering if Bagwork is just playing fake AI bars over a real Drake beat, the lines feature Drake still salty over Demar DeRozan’s appearance in the “Not Like Us” video, dissing him for his failure to bring the Toronto Raptors a basketball championship while bigging up Kawhi Leonard for getting the job done (nevermind that he left the team immediately after) with some admittedly pretty good wordplay: “When you was a part of the team we used to be planning our Mexico trip in the spring/We must’ve been dealing in the spur of the moment, cuz why did we think you could get us a ring?”
Indulging in petty low-hanging fruit about a now year-and-a-half old beef? Yeah, it’s definitely Drake. One way or another, we’ll see how the Iceman album will play out soon.