Over the last 120 hours, I have listened to 23 hours and 50 minutes of Drake. I worked that out while listening to Drake. Here’s a list of other things I have done while listening to Drake: worked out, cooked, showered, and, during a particularly reluctant relisten of 2025’s $ome $exy $ongs 4 U, fallen asleep. 

In fact, I have listened to so much Drake over the last four days, that I believe I have gained unique insight into his psyche. You see, listening to these albums back-to-back was a painful, almost insufferable slog – but it really shouldn’t have been. Drake has released some of the biggest hits of the 21st century – “God’s Plan”, “Started from the Bottom”, “Headlines”, “One Dance”, “Hotline Bling” and “Passionfruit” are all era-defining. The issue, then, is his blind insistence on surrounding these bangers with dozens of songs that just didn’t need to be released: a chronic case of bloating. 

Sure, there’s probably an element of culture-vulturing in how Drake uses these diverse artists and sounds to remain relevant, but I like to think of him more as hip-hop’s Willy Wonka, offering young talents a golden ticket to the OVO Factory and sharing a slice of his already substantial wealth. If Drake learns to edit and reflect as he did in the good old days, maybe he won’t be remembered as hip-hop’s arch villain. There’s still time, crodie. 

Below, we rank all 21 of Drake’s albums.

21. ROOM FOR IMPROVEMENT (2006)

Listening to Drake’s 2006 mixtape debut, it’s almost impossible to imagine that this is the same artist who would go on to define the 21st century. Room For Improvement is strangely outdated even for 2006, with its poor mixing and distracting narration from Texas’s DJ Smallz making it sound at least ten years older than that. Apart from marking the origins of Drake’s obsession with southern hip-hop that coloured the first half of his career, there’s really zero reason to return to this project. The title describes it perfectly.

20. HABIBTI (2026)

And here we come full-circle, with one of Drake’s three latest releases being as unlistenable as his first. With its strange appropriation of the Arabic language in line with the ongoing ‘Inshallah epidemic’, Habibti is a collection of generic Drake-R&B throwaways that seem to drone on forever, even though it’s Drake’s shortest record on paper. Cool that he got Qendresa on here, though.

19. CARE PACKAGE (2019)

A simple description of this ‘album’ itself serves to explain just how unnecessary it is: Care Package is a compilation of already-released Drake singles from 2010-2016. It’s filler: skip. 

18. HER LOSS (2022) 

Here Drake comes across as the Mutley to 21 Savage’s Dick Dastardly, snickering and yelling ‘Go get ‘em!’ from the sidelines while 21 Savage does his monotone rap thing. It’s pretty repetitive and the first track is all anyone really needs to hear to get the gist. In fact, in the case of “Circo Loco” sending shots at Megan Thee Stallion for (wait for it) being shot, there’s a lot of stuff you explicitly don’t need to hear. It’s the start of a far-right backsliding that’s seen Drizzy align himself with manosphere-adjacent streamer Adin Ross, and the only thing saving Her Loss from being further down the list is the undeniably stellar production from Atlanta legend Metro Boomin and Lil Yachty.

17. $OME $EXY $ONGS 4 U (2025)

I question whether anyone really wanted 77 minutes of Drake-R&B – not least after he’d just been demolished by Kendrick Lamar in the rap beef of the century. $ome $exy $ongs 4 U has the unique claim of hosting one of the cringiest moments in Drake’s career: namely, his pitiful attempts at rapping in Spanish on “Meet Your Padre” (“Baby girl I want to meet your madre, pay respects to your padre”). Still, while “Nokia”’s slack-jawed “Baby gurrrrl” refrain comes across almost equally as cringe, it deserves praise for settling into a catchy, Nokia ringtone-sampling crunchy groove in its second half. Drake should’ve just released “Nokia” as a single and kept it stepping.

16. COMEBACK SEASON (2007)

Comeback from what, exactly? Drake’s second full-length project still shows very few signs of the mainstream greatness he would later achieve, but it at least marks the first moment that he dropped anything remotely listenable. Released while Drizzy was still mainly known for being the child actor star of Degrassi, Comeback Season sees the Toronto rapper weaving ‘lyrical miracle’-style verses over pre-existing hip-hop instrumentals from legends like 9th Wonder, J Dilla and Kanye West. It’s nothing like the Drake we know today, but it’s a decent hip-hop mixtape in a vacuum.

15. THANK ME LATER (2010)

Thank Me Later is a pop-sellout album without a mainstream hit. Instead, it’s a thoroughly hipster rap record replete with fedora-coded lines like “What am I doing? Oh yeah! I’m doing me!”. Still, far from the painfully repetitive lows of later projects like Her Loss and $ome $exy $ongs 4 U, it’s a nice reminder that Drake once had new experiences to share, with vulnerable cuts like “Find Your Love” and “Over” taking cues from Kanye’s recently-released 808s & Heartbreak and Kid Cudi’s Man On The Moon. 

14. FOR ALL THE DOGS (2023)

By the time that Drake runs through every month of the year in a sprawling 64-bar-plus verse on the otherwise well-written SZA collab “Slime You Out”, it becomes abundantly clear that he is scrambling for inspiration. Elsewhere, it features a verse from Drake’s son Adonis (then five years old) – which sounds cute, until you realise it's a track about shooting someone in broad daylight. Bizarre.

13. DARK LANE DEMO TAPES (2020)

It might be because I grew up in London, but Drake seems insufferably cringe in this era, going from ‘Toosie Sliding’ in a balaclava and a puffer jacket, to embarking on a Da Vinci Code level of code-switching as he veers between Florida, New York and London slang in the final three tracks. All that aside, however, DLDT does deserve some praise for its experimentation, notably foregoing Drake’s staple producers 40 and Boi-1da in favour of side-quests into rage and lo-fi hip-hop. “Toosie Slide” is also undeniably a bop if you turn the video off. 

12. MAID OF HONOUR (2026)

There is no honour here, which becomes obvious as soon as you hear Sexyy Redd doing a shameless interpolation of the Cha-Cha-Slide (on the Peggy Gou-sampling “Cheetah Print”). It’s essentially an album full of club demos, erratically careening between Jersey Club, afrobeats and Popcaan-esque deconstructed dancehall. With a standout moment from hitherto-undiscovered rapper Iconic Savvy, Maid of Honour is light-hearted fun if you switch your brain off. 

11. HONESTLY, NEVERMIND (2022) 

Honestly, Nevermind is a welcome switch-up on Drizzy’s seemingly endless rap-R&B records, instead settling on house and a dose of Baltimore club (“Sticky”). Being one of only a handful of solo Drake albums under an hour long, as well as featuring some of the most distinctive production in his discography and also notably only having one feature, it’s a breath of fresh air. 

10. WHAT A TIME TO BE ALIVE (2015)

This is Drake’s first and best collab album, continuing his foray into trap music with the help of lovable mumble rapper Future, as well as launching Atlanta hitmaker Metro Boomin to mainstream success. Future generally outperforms Drake on every track here, but it’s nonetheless a landmark trap album, with lead single “Jumpman” becoming a staple of the genre. 

9. ICEMAN (2026)

As much as everyone has memed last Friday’s triple-release, Iceman is a great Drake album. The production here is nothing short of excellent, delivering a first-class flight through lo-fi hip-hop, rage, west coast rap (courtesy of P-Lo), UK Ug-style distortion (courtesy of Wraith9) and, thankfully, only very sparing sprinkles of Drake-R&B. In stark contrast with counterparts Habibti and Maid of Honour, Drizzy actually has something to say, reflecting on a period of crisis following his feud with Kendrick and, paradoxically, his increasing inability to reflect on himself. As time goes on, hopefully, listeners can separate Iceman from the dead weights that accompanied it. 

8. CERTIFIED LOVERBOY (2021)

Certified Loverboy is Drake Marmite – some criticised how silly it was, but I’d make the case that it’s subtly self-aware (or, at the very least, enjoyably self-indulgent). Complete with kitschy “Previously on…” narration, it’s essentially a sitcom of Drake memes brought to life, a caricature of his womanising persona. 

Sonically, it’s a neat microcosm of everything modern Drake stands for: vacuous hip-hop-R&B anthems complete with a couple of money-hungry detours into rage and Afrobeats. Unfortunately, like every post-Views Drake album, it’s just too bloated to have much replayability. 

7. VIEWS (2016)

Everyone remembers “One Dance feat. Wizkid and Kyla” and “Hotline Bling”, right? Can you remember any of the other 18 songs on here? It’s at this point that fluid retention became a genuine threat to Drake’s career. Outside of these highlights, Views feels almost singularly soulless, plodding through an hour of grey-washed, wallowing rap-R&B – even the Rihanna-featuring “Too Good” feels meh. Still, the stratospheric heights of “Hotline Bling” and “One Dance” keep Views afloat – and the latter song can be partly credited for introducing Afrobeats to a mainstream Western audience.  

6. SCORPION (2018)

Doctors are saying this is one of the most extreme cases of Drake Bloat they've ever seen. It’s tragic that the same album that gave us career highs like “God’s Plan”, “In My Feelings”, “Nonstop” and “Nice For What”, also gave us lows like “Ratchet Happy Birthday”, which sounds like it was bought for £25 on Cameo. When you drain the excess fluid, however, you’re left with a moody, conflicted trap-R&B project that marked a strong comeback following Drake’s highly-publicised beef with Pusha T, catching the 6ix God in his feelings in all the best ways. This could have been Drake’s second-best album if he weren’t surrounded by yes men. 

5. IF YOU’RE READING THIS IT’S TOO LATE (2015)

After almost a decade of pining after Houston’s southern hip-hop, here marks the birth of trap Drake – the first of many attempts to reinvent himself and his sound in the following years. Still, IYRTITL has some of the best rapping we’ve ever seen from Drizzy, particularly on the first half’s standouts “Legend”, “Energy” and “6 God”, which provides one of Drake’s most iconic instrumentals, sampling Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy Kong’s Quest.

In true Drake fashion, this project also played a pivotal role in the evolution of mixtapes as a format, which subsequently shifted from a loose, copyright-oblivious collection of singles to a serious body of work. 

4. SO FAR GONE (2009)

If you can get look past the somewhat tacky, B-movie style artwork, So Far Gone s probably Drake’s most underrated album. The confessional songwriting – likely taking cues from Kanye’s 808 & Heartbreaks, released the previous year – is a far cry from the mostly vacuous lyrics we’ve got ever since. Perhaps the best example is progressive hip-hop cut “The Calm”, which sheds light on Drake’s turbulent home life and his determination to ‘make it’ at all costs. Elsewhere, he questions the point of money and fame if it still means he’s alone – a stark contrast with his later dedication to “The concept of putting money first” on IYRTITL. To quote “The Calm”, “Where did it all go wrong?”.

Sure, there are some drawbacks here – namely, Drake’s strange hoarding of Lil Wayne throwaways and the bizarre collaboration with Swedish pop group Peter, Bjorn and John – but this is by far the closest we’ve ever got to Drake as a real person. 

3. MORE LIFE (2017)

New Drake unlocked: Bri’ish Drake, who now says phrases like “man fix tings”. Following his foray into Afrobeats with “One Dance” the year before, Drake dives headfirst into UK culture with features from Skepta, Giggs and Jorja Smith, while manically oscillating between R&B, trap, grime and Afrobeats. 

It’s an intentionally loose and vibes-based approach to album creation – hinted at by Drake’s cryptic promotion of the album as a ‘playlist’ – but it works. By this point, Drizzy was no longer a salt-of-the-earth rapper but a verified popstar, and tracks like “Passionfruit” and “Get It Together feat. Black Coffee and Jorja Smith” are exactly that: pop songs, and very good ones. It’s a bonus that it brought global attention to the UK’s grime scene.

2. NOTHING WAS THE SAME (2013)

Nothing Was The Same is an apt title, marking the last Drake album before he started to endlessly reinvent himself in the pursuit of staying relevant. It’s also one of his best. Sure, Drake’s lyrics here are unashamedly materialistic, but it’s also one of the last moments that Drake felt believably cool – with highlights like “Started From The Bottom”, “Hold On, We’re Going Home feat. Majid Jordan” (one of the finest ballads of the 21st century) and “Pound Cake” all still holding up to this day. 

1. TAKE CARE (2011)  

Take Care is a masterpiece, and it is the tragedy of Drake’s career that the idea of him producing another one now seems so ridiculous. It’s a quantum leap ahead of the preceding project, Thank Me Later, featuring back-to-back bangers of woozy, “Swimming Pools”-era hip-hop. And Kendrick is worth noting here because he, like every one of Take Care’s star-studded roster of features, delivers a career-high performance.

It’s of its time in all the best ways, capturing the era when hip-hop was still the backbone of any good party – it's even widely credited with popularising the term ‘YOLO’, which was truly inescapable in the early 2010s (for better or worse). Take Care also saw unexpected new life a couple of years ago when fakemink credited “Headlines” with inspiring his signature, dance-ready drum pattern that has since become foundational to the UK Ug rap scene as a whole. Both sonically and mentally, Drake has spent the last 15 years trying to return to this peak.