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Gracie Abrams, Drake, Tove Lo and More Lead Billboard’s New Music Friday Guide
Drake drops three projects, Gracie Abrams teases Daughter From Hell, and Tove Lo returns with new music in Billboard’s Friday guide.
Drake turned Friday into a full-scale event, releasing Iceman alongside two more projects, Maid Of Honour and Habibti, for a combined 43 new tracks and nearly two-and-a-half hours of music. It is the kind of oversupply that only makes sense in the context of an artist who has spent years treating release day like a referendum. With his solo full-length discography now into double digits, he arrives with more than enough material to make his point.
Billboard’s Friday Music Guide is built for exactly this kind of week: the releases that crowd playlists, shape conversations and tend to hang around long after New Music Friday ends. Last week’s edition ran through Charli xcx, MUNA and Kelela. This time, the lineup stretches from Gracie Abrams’ first taste of her newly announced fourth album, Daughter From Hell, to Tove Lo’s return ahead of her sixth album, ESTRUS, due Sept. 18, with Rostam and Jorja Smith also in the mix.
Gracie Abrams, “Hit the Wall”
Gracie Abrams has been working with Aaron Dessner long enough that his recent description of her next album carries some weight. In an Instagram caption earlier this week, he said, “You’ll hear us expanding our musical vocabulary and pushing into uncharted waters sonically…it feels elevated in every way.” “Hit the Wall” does not overstate the case, but it does suggest a new pressure point in Abrams’ writing. The song is airy, but hardly weightless, with lines like, “A room full of doctors and an inkblot/ I’m drawn into headlights, have a blind spot” and, “I live in a pattern of breakdowns/ You’ll bend to my silence, it’s so loud.” It works less like a reset than a bridge, linking where she has been to where she seems determined to go next. If this is the opening move for Daughter From Hell, the title may be doing more than playing coy.
Drake, Iceman
After months of buildup, Drake did not just arrive with Iceman. He widened the frame, also dropping Maid of Honour and Habibti on Friday. Taken together, the three projects amount to a major burst of output, and the guest lists reflect that scale. Iceman focus track “Ran To Atlanta” features Future and Molly Santana, one of only two tracks on the project with featured guests. Maid Of Honour and Habibti are more crowded, with appearances from Sexxy Red, Central Cee, PARTYNEXTDOOR and others across the tracklists. Whatever else the release strategy says, it suggests Drake had a lot to unload after For All the Dogs in 2023.
Tove Lo, “I’m Your Girl Right?”
It has been four years since Tove Lo last released an album, and the wait for new music has not dulled what she does best. “I’m Your Girl Right?” sits neatly between mid-tempo pop and a full dance-floor charge, the same difficult balance that has long made her records feel a little more lived-in than the average club single. The song serves as the lead single for ESTRUS, out Sept. 18, and Tove Lo framed the return plainly in a statement: “I know you’ve been waiting a long time and I hope it’s worth the wait. It was for me!”
Rostam, “Hardy (feat. Clairo)”
With American Stories, Rostam keeps making the case that patience suits him. His last solo album, Changephobia, came out in 2021, and “Hardy” shows the same attention to arrangement that has always made his work stand apart. The track begins with jittery, beautiful strings before easing into piano chords, then brings the strings back halfway through for an instrumental passage that folds in trumpet before Clairo’s verse arrives. By the end, the song lands on a hard-won note of acceptance: “Some things you said to me have stuck in my mind/ And though I’ll never have the chance to say why/ Maybe the greatest art is never completed/ We only have to leave it knowing we tried.”
Jorja Smith, “What’s Done Is Done”
Jorja Smith’s voice has always carried a kind of velvet certainty, and “What’s Done Is Done” gives her room to use it without overcomplicating the frame. The surprise here is the production: heart-pounding synth and bass give the song a creeping, electric pulse that feels built for the basement-club mood Smith leans into in the music video. Her vocals glide as expected, but the track around them is a sharper, darker proposition than her usual soft-focus sheen.
