Yes, Drake dissed people on these new albums. The better question is whether all of it lands the way he thinks it does.

ICEMAN, Habibti, and Maid of Honour arrived on May 15 as a 43-song flood, and there is no way to listen to the package without hearing the room Drake is rapping from. This is not a peaceful comeback. This is a man walking back into the party after everybody spent a year debating whether he got embarrassed, whether the crown slipped, whether the jokes finally stuck, and whether he still had the bite to make people nervous.

He clearly still has the bite. What he does not always have here is the restraint.

Kendrick Lamar is the main target, even when Drake does not need to say his name every time. That was always going to be the case. ICEMAN is Drake's first major solo statement after the Kendrick battle, and the album lives under that shadow whether Drake likes it or not. Reports from E! News and Rolling Stone Canada point to lines that appear to question Kendrick's public image, his relationship to Compton, and the streaming conversation around "Not Like Us." The FADER also framed the trilogy as the first real moment where listeners get to hear how the beef and its fallout are sitting in Drake's mind.

My read: Drake sounds angry, but not surprised. That matters. These records do not feel like the first draft of a wounded rapper. They feel like a long note he kept in his phone and finally decided to send after revising it too many times. Sometimes that makes the writing sharp. Sometimes it makes it feel like he has been arguing with ghosts while the rest of the world moved to a new meme.

The strongest shots are the ones that reveal emotion without begging for a headline. When Drake sounds cold, he is compelling. When he sounds like he is still counting who stood where during the beef, the music gets smaller. You can hear the difference between a rapper defending his legacy and a superstar checking the attendance sheet.

A$AP Rocky and Rihanna appear to get pulled into that emotional accounting too. E! News highlighted bars that fans interpreted as shots at A$AP and references to Rihanna, while Rolling Stone Canada pointed to similar lines as part of Drake revisiting old claims and old tensions. None of this is brand new territory for Drake. He has always used relationship history, celebrity proximity, and bruised pride as fuel. The difference now is that the audience is less willing to treat every personal jab as clever just because he delivered it smoothly.

That is the danger with Drake in diss mode in 2026. He is still one of the best at making pettiness sound expensive, but pettiness has a shelf life. When he aims at A$AP, Rihanna, or anyone connected to that old orbit, the writing has to be surgical. If it is not, it starts to sound like a man reopening a group chat nobody asked to rejoin.

LeBron James also seems to catch smoke, according to E! News, with fans reading certain lines as a reaction to LeBron showing up at Kendrick's Los Angeles concert during the height of the feud. That one is interesting because it tells you how deeply Drake may have personalized the battle. A rap beef is one thing. Watching famous friends, athletes, executives, and industry people pick a side in public is another. The LeBron stuff feels less like a traditional diss and more like a loyalty invoice.

And honestly, that is where this whole thing gets human.

Under the flexing, under the cold branding, under the triple-album spectacle, Drake sounds like somebody who remembers every chair that turned away from him. That does not automatically make him right. It does make the music more revealing. The best parts of this era are not the insults themselves. They are the little flashes where you realize the biggest artist in the room still keeps score like the rest of us.

Rick Ross, DJ Khaled, J. Cole, and Joe Budden also circle the discussion depending on which track and which outlet you are reading. The FADER noted that early chatter around the rollout included alleged shots at Lamar, LeBron, J. Cole, and Joe Budden. E! News also read bars as possibly aimed at Rick Ross and DJ Khaled. Again, the word is "possibly" for a reason. Drake has mastered the half-lit diss: direct enough for fans to decode, vague enough to deny if the room turns on him.

That used to feel like strategy. Now it sometimes feels like insurance.

Still, I would rather hear Drake sound messy and alive than polished and bored. That is the part people may not want to admit. The disses give these albums a pulse. A triple album can easily become wallpaper, especially from an artist who has already given the world every version of himself: the mob boss, the lover, the wounded king, the petty ex, the global pop curator. The shots, even the imperfect ones, remind you that there is still a person behind the machine.

But here is the honest opinion: Drake wins when he stops trying to prove he won.

If ICEMAN is supposed to be the cold comeback, the most powerful move is not sounding untouched. Nobody believes that. The more interesting Drake is the one who admits, through tone if not through confession, that the last two years changed him. Kendrick clearly hit a nerve. The industry reaction hit another one. The public jokes hit another one. Pretending otherwise would be boring. This music is at its best when Drake lets that bruise show and then raps through it.

So did Drake diss anyone? Absolutely. Kendrick is the main target. A$AP Rocky, Rihanna, LeBron James, Rick Ross, DJ Khaled, J. Cole, and Joe Budden all appear in the wider blast radius, depending on how you read the bars and which reports you trust.

Did he need to diss all of them? Probably not.

Did it make the release more interesting? Definitely.

That is the uncomfortable truth of this Drake moment. The disses are not always clean, not always fair, and not always as devastating as fans will claim by Monday morning. But they do make ICEMAN feel like something more than a playlist dump. They make it feel like a superstar trying to thaw himself out in public, still angry, still calculating, still too proud to say he is hurt, and still talented enough to make everybody listen anyway.

Sources: E! News reported on fan-read shots at Kendrick Lamar, Rihanna, A$AP Rocky, LeBron James, Rick Ross, and DJ Khaled. Rolling Stone Canada reported that ICEMAN addresses the Kendrick fallout and highlighted bars being read as shots connected to Lamar and A$AP Rocky. The FADER reported the three-album rollout and noted the wider beef fallout involving Lamar, LeBron James, J. Cole, and Joe Budden. The Los Angeles Times covered the 43-song release and framed ICEMAN as Drake's tough-talking return after the Kendrick battle. Article image: original AI-generated editorial artwork created for Mixtape Plug; no external image source used.