Drake’s long-awaited album Iceman is due Friday, but a track tied to the project leaked on social media late Wednesday night into Thursday morning, sending the rollout off course just days before release. The apparent song, rumored to be called “1AM in Albany,” appears to take aim at Kendrick Lamar and LeBron James.
One line hears Drake saying he “shouldn’t even be shocked to see you in that arena, because you always made your career off of switching teams up,” a clear reference to James, who moved from the Cleveland Cavaliers to the Miami Heat in 2011, returned to Cleveland, and later joined the Los Angeles Lakers. Another lyric says, “please stop asking what’s going on with 23 and me. I’m a real n----, and he’s not, it’s in my DNA,” continuing the apparent attack.
The leak lands at a sharp moment for Drake. Iceman would be his first solo album since For All The Dogs in October 2023, and it is being described as his ninth album. The song is also said to fit the hour-stamped series he started with “9AM in Dallas” in 2009, a run that has long been a part of his branding and his way of turning side talk into direct shots.
James matters to that story because he was once one of Drake’s closest famous friends. He took the stage during one of Drake’s concerts years ago, and the two were seen together repeatedly, including at an NBA game in Toronto in 2015, a pool party in Toronto in 2017 and another postgame conversation in 2022. But James later began showing loyalty to Kendrick Lamar during the feud that stretched from 2024 into last year and ended up feeding into Lamar’s Super Bowl halftime show performance.
That split gives the leaked track its edge. What might have passed as another Toronto-to-city-name entry in Drake’s catalog now reads like a public score-settling exercise, with the album’s release only hours away and the conversation already centered less on the record itself than on who is being called out in it.
The timing also raises the stakes for James, who is set to become an unrestricted free agent this summer. Drake has often turned personal shifts into music, but this one arrives with a bigger audience waiting to see whether the leak is real, whether it stays online and how much of the finished album matches the version now circulating. If the track makes the final cut, Friday will not just mark Drake’s return. It will reopen two old relationships in the most public way possible.
