Three leaked tracks are putting the internet on high alert before Iceman drops Friday
With Iceman hours away, leaked Drake tracks are sending the internet into a full spiral over whether the rap feud is officially back on
Less than 24 hours before the release of his highly anticipated album Iceman, Drake found himself at the center of a leak storm that has the internet asking one very loaded question. Are he and Kendrick Lamar back at it? Three songs attributed to Drake surfaced online on May 13, and at least one of them appears to take direct aim at Lamar in a way that suggests the two rappers may not be done with each other just yet.
Iceman will be Drake’s first solo studio album since For All the Dogs dropped in 2023, and the rollout has included a live stream series with a fourth and final episode set for Thursday night before the album’s midnight release.
What leaked and what it contains
Three tracks made their way onto the internet ahead of the drop. One is described as a slightly shorter studio version of a song called Supermax, which Drake had previously played during one of his live streams. A second track, being called 3PM in New Orleans, surfaced but cuts off before the full song plays out. The third, referred to online as 1AM in Albany, is the one generating the most conversation.
On that track, the artist heard on the recording takes shots at Kendrick Lamar, Dr. Dre, and LeBron James across multiple lines. The Lamar references are pointed enough to suggest this was written specifically as a response within the ongoing narrative between the two rappers. Whether all three songs will appear on the final album remains unclear, though rumors have circulated for weeks that Iceman could arrive as a double-disc project, which would allow room for all of them.
The authenticity question nobody can fully answer yet
Here is where it gets complicated. In an era where AI-generated music has become increasingly difficult to distinguish from the real thing, neither the leaked tracks nor the bars on them can be fully verified as authentic Drake recordings ahead of the album’s official release. A convincing AI-generated track could circulate for days before anyone confirms or denies it, and bad actors have leaned into that uncertainty before major hip-hop releases in the past.
What is known is that the internet is treating the leaks as real, the lines referencing Lamar are specific enough to read as intentional, and the timing right before Iceman drops adds a layer of calculated energy to the whole situation whether the leaks were planned or not.
What this means for the bigger picture
The backdrop to all of this matters. Kendrick Lamar’s album GNX and his track euphoria were recently removed from Apple Music, and the videos for Not Like Us and Luther were pulled from YouTube. That development alone had already put the rap world on edge about what might be coming next in the ongoing tension between the two artists.
If the leaked tracks are authentic and make the final Iceman cut, Lamar will almost certainly have a response ready. The two have not let rounds in this conversation go unanswered before, and there is no reason to believe this time would be different. Friday’s release will answer a lot of questions. Until then, the internet is doing what it always does, waiting and watching every corner of social media for the next move.