From Kendrick Lamar to DJ Khaled, Everyone Drake Appears to Diss on Iceman

Drake came back on Friday, May 15, with three new albums and, on the biggest of them, a fresh round of grievances. After two years of being dragged through rap’s public commentary machine, especially in the wake of his battle with Kendrick Lamar, the Toronto rapper used Iceman to answer back with unusually direct force. It is the kind of record that suggests a player trying to reassert control after being pushed into a corner.

The album arrives after Drake debuted Iceman during episode four of his livestream on Thursday night, May 14, before revealing that not one but three projects would land the next day. The main attraction is Iceman itself, a heavy, bar-driven set that finds him in a more reflective mode without letting go of the need to swing back at old enemies. Elsewhere, Maid of Honour and Habibti tilt toward R&B and dance, with a looser, more romance-minded focus. But the record that matters most here is the one that sounds like Drake has something to settle.

That urgency runs through the album. On “Make Them Cry,” he opens with a line that all but announces the tone: “I’m in the cut just loading rebuttals.” Later, he gets more explicit about the toll of last year’s public fallout, rapping, “What died back in 2024 was a big piece/ So it’s like this s— is me, but it isn’t me/ Y’all keep on asking what it did to me/ That’s what it did to me.” The song makes clear that the scars from 2024 are still there, even as he frames them as fuel.

Drake also uses the album to address his father’s cancer battle, his lawsuit against UMG, and his recent reunion with Future on “Ran to Atlanta,” where he notes that “me and Hendrix back by popular demand” after the two appear to have moved past their issues. But for all that personal material, Iceman is also a scoreboard. Drake seems to have a line for nearly everyone he feels crossed him, from former collaborators to industry executives to athletes and fellow rappers. Below, the clearest targets.

The names Drake seems to have in his sights on Iceman

Kendrick Lamar
Song(s): “Make Them Pay,” “Make Them Remember”
Lyric(s): “Damn, who is this guy for real/ I guess a magician/ 100 million streams vanished, no one got questions.”
“And Muggsy Bogues dunked for once, even I’m a bit amazed.”

DJ Khaled
Song(s): “Make Them Pay”
Lyric(s): “And Khaled, you know what I mean/ The beef was fully live, you went halal, and got on your deen/ And your people are still waitin’ for a Free Palestine/ But apparently, everything isn’t black and white and red and green.”

Playboi Carti
Song(s): “Whisper My Name”
Lyric(s): “Baby boy please, I heard what you said to lil bro about me/ Yeah, and when you run into the Iceman, what you gon’ do except freeze/ You not bout to squeeze/ You not in the streets.”

Rick Ross
Song(s): “Make Them Pay”
Lyric(s): “Dog, I was aiding Ross with streams before Adin Ross had ever streamed.”

A$AP Rocky
Song(s): “Burning Bridges,” “Firm Friends”
Lyric(s): “Your baby momma ain’t even post a single, damn, where she at/ … You saw my brother, you was tryna fix it, now you drop your album and you back dissing.”
“K-Y-S, A-S-A-P, that’s some s–t that you could do for me.”

J. Cole
Song(s): “Make Them Pay,” “Make Them Remember”
Lyric(s): “Me, I stood ten T’s and accepted the mission/ Cause I’d much rather death than submission/ How can you press the ignition and let some memories of the past affect your decision/ I love you cause of the history, but if we being real, I could never forgive you/ And you never called me back, but destiny’s written, for real/ F— a big three anyway, there was too many chefs in the kitchen, it was a mess to begin with.”
“I could’ve fell back like the married rapper, but we engaged.”

Lucian Grainge/UMG
Song(s): “B’s on the Table”
Lyric(s): “I’m fighting the man, not suing a rapper, you boys are not listening.”

Jay-Z
Song(s): “Janice STFU,” “Whisper My Name”
Lyric(s): “We know how you OGs rocking already, my n—a, the jig is up.”
“I’ll take $500K, not the dinner, I never could learn s–t from none of y’all.”

Mustard
Song(s): “2 Hard 4 Radio”
Lyric(s): “Mustard heard about us, gotta catch up to the slaps/ You ain’t had one since me and YG rapped/ Facts, 900 million for the tracks, ‘Rack City,’ b—h, we remember that/ Yeah, you should try and get back to that.”

Pharrell
Song(s): “Make Them Pay”
Lyric(s): “I got all the chains that they ever repped in Virginia/ I got n—as’ prized possessions, I get possessive on n—as.”

Pusha T
Song(s): “Make Them Pay”
Lyric(s): “I got all the chains that they ever repped in Virginia/ I got n—as’ prized possessions, I get possessive on n—as.”

LeBron James
Song(s): “Make Them Remember”
Lyric(s): “I shouldn’t even be shocked to see you in that arena/ Because you always made your career off of switchin’ teams up.”
“Please stop askin’ about what’s goin’ on with 23 and me/ I’m a real n—a and he’s not, it’s in my DNA.”

DeMar DeRozan
Song(s): “National Treasures”
Lyric(s): “We must’ve been dealin’ the spur of the moment/ Cause why did we think you could get us a ring/ They braggin’ ’bout how you went home, the f— are they on/ Crodie, we threw ’em away/ G Pop sent us a real one from Daygo/ And next thing we knew, we was doin’ parades.”

Dr. Dre
Song(s): “Make Them Remember”
Lyric(s): “If Drake took out the AK, maybe he’d be in jail/ Just based off the name that it spells/ What they say they just smelled/ I heard they got special places in hell/ For n—as jokin’ about evil when they did it themselves, damn.”

Iceman makes for a familiar kind of Drake project in one sense, but it also feels sharpened by circumstance. After years of dominance, the subtext here is not just retaliation but recalibration. He sounds less interested in floating above the noise than in naming it, line by line, and reminding everyone exactly who he thinks helped create it.