The Game, the rapper famous for Y2K hits such as “Hate It Or Love It” and “How We Do,” misses the era when Drake put out at least an album a year.
“If you’re in the club, on a yacht or just driving in the car with your girl, when Drake comes on, he makes everything cool,” the Game said. “Ever since he went away, it’s been kind of dry.”
On Friday, Drake is set to return with “Iceman,” his first solo record since his bitter public feud with Kendrick Lamar in 2024. While the album is a chance for the Toronto rapper to bounce back, some music executives also hope it will give a needed boost to commercial rap as a whole.
Drake and Lamar, both nearing 40, remain unrivaled in their cross-generational appeal and extensive track record of hits. There are no up-and-coming rappers nipping at their heels. Representatives for Drake and Lamar did not respond to requests for comment.
“Hip-hop has been suffering ,” said Ray Daniels, a former label executive and host of the podcast “Ray Daniels Presents.” “Everybody is watching these ‘Iceman’ numbers.”
The tiff between the two rap stars was one of the most talked about hip-hop events in recent memory, chock-full of the salacious, “he said what?!” drama of reality TV. The men traded a series of incendiary, insulting songs, but the one that endures is Lamar’s “Not Like Us”—spooky, walloping, chart-topping, Grammy-winning . His performance of the track marked the giddy peak of the Super Bowl halftime show last year for more than 133 million viewers.
Feb 9, 2025; New Orleans, LA, USA; Recording artist Kendrick Lamar performs during the halftime show of Super Bowl LIX between the Philadelphia Eagles and the Kansas City Chiefs at Ceasars Superdome. Mandatory Credit: Mark J. Rebilas-Imagn Images
Around two years after its release, “they’re still blasting that song in so many places,” said Natalia Perez, a Los Angeles-based radio personality. “Drake was very highly regarded before then. For some people, that knocked him off the pedestal a bit.”
The bloodlust around the high-profile tit-for-tat obscured the fact that commercial hip-hop had become stagnant. The genre failed to produce a No. 1 album during the first half of 2023, the longest drought since 1993, according to Billboard. Rap songs briefly vanished from the top 40 during 2025, which hadn’t happened since 1990.
That disappearance was partially due to Billboard’s decision to start removing older tracks from the Hot 100 more quickly when they are no longer climbing the chart—after 26 weeks, for example, rather than 52. Still, at the end of the year, the data company Luminate reported that current R&B and hip-hop listening was down 12.2%.
“I’m not going to say club life is dead,” said DJ Whoo Kid, a veteran New York radio host. “But if you go to nightclubs in New York or L.A., there’s just something missing.”
Perez argued that the scarcity of recent rap breakouts is less about the genre’s lack of imagination and more about migrating tastes. “What we’ve been seeing the last couple years is pop very much dominating,” she said, pointing to Taylor Swift, Olivia Rodrigo and Harry Styles . The Game praised the country superstar Morgan Wallen for “kicking everybody’s a— from here to f—ing Kazakhstan.”
The dearth of new hip-hop stars makes Drake’s absence more keenly felt by his supporters. While he released a collaborative project with PartyNextDoor last year, he hasn’t put out a solo album since 2023.
“None of [the rising rappers] are consistently making music that you can have fun with, drink with your friends to, go out to,” said Michael Davis, a 28-year-old Drake fan based in New York.
Drake’s catalog has earned around 237 million streams a week on average in the first four months of 2026. These numbers are down compared with the start of 2024 before the rap spat, though they still dwarf Lamar’s weekly average of roughly 88 million, according to Luminate.
“I’ve always listened to Drake—in the middle of the beef, now, whenever,” said Fat Joe, the rapper and podcaster. “When you hear the amount of hit records this guy’s got, it’s not even fair.”
George “Geo” Cook, head of content and audience for Service Broadcasting in Dallas, said he recently conducted an informal poll during brunch. “There were different groups of young ladies at the restaurant that I was at,” he explained. “I stopped to ask a few of them— ‘people said Kendrick kind of cooked Drake. Is Drake done?’”
The women refused to entertain this theory: “No way.”
