Iceman Review

The critical line on this one runs mixed at best, and the complaint repeats everywhere: too long, too fixated on a fight he lost, too much grievance sold as vindication. Some of that is fair on the writing, and none of it is the whole record. What Iceman does that nothing in his catalog has done since Scorpion is sound awake. Make Them Cry opens with real menace. Dust and Whisper My Name are the tightest two track run he has sequenced in a decade.

What Did I Miss? sat as a single for ten months and still earns its slot in the running order. Firm Friends puts him over a Conductor Williams beat, which is the first time in years he sounds like he has to work for the pocket rather than own it by default. Ran to Atlanta gets Future doing something new instead of trading on the memory of when they did. The knock is that he cannot let it go, and he cannot, but the refusal is the engine here, and a bored Drake album is a far worse object than an angry one.

Sixty nine minutes is too many, four or five tracks exist only to be tracks, and that is why the writing sits a tier under the production. What earns the grade is what the thing actually pulled off: three straight weeks at the top of the album chart, and the first artist ever to hold its top three positions at once. The most alive he has sounded since 2018, and it belongs beside his best.