“Nationwide Treasures” is monitor 9 on ICEMAN, the primary of three albums Drake dropped on Might 15, 2026, and it spends most of its runtime making clear who belongs in Toronto and who must hold transferring.
The rollout informed you one thing earlier than a single bar performed. Drake lit the CN Tower for the discharge, ice dice projections one night time, loading percentages and inexperienced screens the following, crowds gathering beneath to observe. The track opens with him referencing the tower straight. He didn’t want to elucidate what it meant. The constructing did the work.
Boi-1da and OZ construct the primary half on low synths and sparse kicks. It strikes slowly, intentionally, like somebody measuring their phrases in a chilly room. Then Wraith9’s beat change arrives and the temperature adjustments. What was tense turns into virtually unfastened. The second half drops into one thing bouncier, nearer to “No Tellin” territory, and the shift is jarring by design. You go from Drake holding a grudge to Drake laughing in regards to the grudge together with his crew behind him in bedazzled OVO owl sweaters. The repetition finally ends up sounding colder than the threats themselves. The break up response to the beat change is actual. One camp argues the primary half is a generational beat that the change actively undermines. The opposite holds that the second half is the place the track opens up.
A model leaked in November 2025 with a verse from Toronto rapper Pressa on it. Drake pulled it. The ultimate minimize replaces the verse with the beat change and a second Drake verse. The elimination says one thing the track by no means bothers to say out loud. This was by no means a cypher. It was all the time one man speaking.
Among the bars stack meanings on prime of one another. The COVID line lands with an audible cough dropped into the center of the supply, Drake turning his personal vocals into a part of the joke. Two OVO associates, Cabo and Lita, get name-checked occurring missions collectively, packing collectively like {couples} on trip, catching prices like co. A line about speeding to complete performs concurrently as slapping a job collectively rapidly and as a slapshot, the hockey reference buried within the urgency. Drake throws the road in and retains transferring.
The DeRozan bars carry many of the first half. Drake runs by bars about planning Mexico journeys each spring, which is the Cancun meme, the shorthand NBA followers have been operating since Toronto stored getting knocked out early sufficient to show the offseason right into a punchline. He drops it with out context, the best way you employ an inside joke with somebody who already is aware of it.
Spur of the second does two issues directly. Taken actually it means impulsive. Mentioned on this verse it lands on the Spurs, pointing at DeRozan’s 2018 commerce to San Antonio. The query that follows, with trigger why touchdown on Kawhi’s title, asks whether or not Toronto ever genuinely believed DeRozan might ship a championship. The track doesn’t reply it. It doesn’t have to.
What comes subsequent is the credit score. Gregg Popovich, the Spurs head coach who put the commerce collectively, will get referenced as the person who despatched the answer. Kawhi Leonard grew up in Compton and performed faculty ball at San Diego State, which is what the Daygo line factors at. He arrived in Toronto, received the town its first NBA championship in 2019, and left. Drake treats the entire sequence like a transaction that labored out precisely as supposed.
Kendrick already pulled DeRozan into the feud earlier, celebrating his transfer to the Sacramento Kings as a homecoming for a Compton native. Drake solutions that with out naming it. Toronto cherished DeRozan. Toronto additionally received instantly after buying and selling him. He lets each information sit there with out selecting between them. The ring arrived when DeRozan left. He’s studying the scoreboard.
The TPS line within the second half lands with out rationalization. The road hints at Toronto Police Companies exhibiting up outdoors his home, the query of who referred to as them and why sitting within the verse subsequent to a joke about signing cheques and feeling like a squid. He by no means pauses to underline it. The road echoes the broader paranoia and surveillance imagery that ran by the Kendrick feud. When you don’t have the context, it hangs there anyway, which is a part of how Drake makes use of data. He assumes the room already is aware of.
The Alex Moss bar is the strangest one. Moss is a cryonics researcher. Drake casually drops having his physique frozen for revival a century from now, then strikes instantly to hockey imagery. Niggas gotta be round ice with the sticks, I’m like a hockey coach is each a Toronto reference and an ICEMAN album callback delivered with a straight face. Just a few bars later, the bag with a pipe reads each as a weapon in a duffel and as a bagpipe, the Scottish instrument dropped right into a line about Drake’s safety transferring militant. The wordplay barely publicizes itself. Toronto half speaks in jokes. Each bars work in each instructions.
The music video begins on the College of Toronto Scarborough campus. The Weeknd has historical past with the area, together with filming the “Secrets and techniques” video there in 2017. Drake opening his video in the identical constructing could also be a dig, could also be coincidence. Both manner he’s planting himself within the metropolis’s geography at another person’s landmark.
The second half shifts into Drake dancing in a manner that feels knowingly awkward, like he’s in on the joke. OVO crew behind him within the bedazzled owl sweaters. Hockey references all through. One minute smoke and chains, the following a person laughing at his personal punchlines whereas the town watches.
Ironic trigger the Iceman was a pleasant man, now I’m cold and hot had already been circulating on-line months earlier than the album dropped. Whether or not Drake wrote it independently, noticed it and agreed, or just arrived on the similar metaphor, the track leaves utterly open. By the point the outro cycles again by the Wraith9 tag and the refrain repeats, don’t stick round within the 6ix has carried out a number of jobs directly with out ever asserting what any of them had been.
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