Drake loves to bring us together. Ten years ago, his OVO Radio shows on Apple Music were appointment listening when he had new music to share, which in turn made the album releases feel grander and the loosies like real-time transmissions from the days when A-list rappers would visit Flex, Angie Martinez and the like with new bars and a little shit-talk. So, in theory, it’s cool to see him reapply that mindset more recently by rolling out new projects with “live streams.” Last summer, this took the form of dispatches from his European tour that had flimsy narratives and weren’t nearly as compelling as new music drops. But when he released Iceman earlier this year, he perfected the concept by dropping a visual album, live, on YouTube. It was a great way to debut the music, and the clips were varied and mostly dope. Plus, it unified the timeline, a swaggering rebuke to the death of monoculture.
But Drake’s problem is that he just can’t keep himself from going back for one more score. For him, the action is the juice. So, despite dropping something like 20 different music videos and 47 songs simultaneously just a few months ago, Tuesday heralded another gargantuan stream: Fear Of Missing Out. In the weeks leading up to it, rumors abounded that Drake was going to drop a fourth album in a craven bid to stat-pad and flood the market. Drake himself referred to it as a “not-so-short” film. The end result is somewhere in-between: it’s more or less a series of loosely-if-at-all connected music videos, mostly for songs from Made of Honour and Habibiti, the other two Drake albums that were overshadowed by the superior Iceman. But in typical Drake fashion, he peppers the release with a handful of actually new songs, maybe not enough to constitute a full project, but a sturdy EP for sure.
Was it worth it? Drake, having returned in a big way to set summer 2026 over and quell any reports of his demise, might be squandering that goodwill with overkill.
The Videos Are Great, But We Didn’t Need This
Credit where it’s due: Theo Skudra is the MVP of Drake’s creative team right now. Over the years, he’s risen from personal photographer to videographer to director, and it’s been cool to see him grow. There was a time when Drake’s music videos were shoddy and hit-or-miss (save for the Scorpion rollout, when the great Karena Evans took the reins on visuals). Before Iceman, the idea of Drake dropping a visual album spelled doom. But he and Theo have locked in on some pretty fun concepts, like casting Drake’s mom and her lifelong girlfriends for “True Bestie”) and a more distinctive approach to cinematography (even when it’s as simple as Drake in the middle of the ocean harboring Toronto). The problem, though, is that FOMO feels like a sequel that the studio greenlit just because the original broke box office records. The new songs are cool, but in the days after the stream, when it was nearly impossible to find it anywhere online until Drake finally uploaded it to YouTube Thursday night, I wasn’t feverishly looking to run back ripped clips. Instead I was running through the immaculate sequence of “Dust” into “Whisper My Name” into “Janice” again.
As for the videos for the dance and R&B tracks, it’s too little too late, like Drake realized months later that his other children need attention, too. Back in May, everyone said the Maid tracks would run the summer. But imagine how much harder the “Outside Tweaking” video might’ve hit in July?
