What happens when longtime platonic relationships between two men fade out? For Drake, it means dropping three albums in one night that call out more than a dozen people, including some who were once his closest compatriots. 

On Friday at midnight, the Canadian rapper dropped 43(!) songs, with “Iceman” alongside two other albums, “Habibti” and “Maid of Honour,”—an obituary of sorts to some of his most notable bromances. That includes cuts at some of his closest career collaborators including Rick Ross, J.Cole, and NBA legend LeBron James, who once called the Canadian rapper “family.” 

“I shouldn’t even be shocked to see you in that arena, because you always made your career off of switching teams up,” Drake raps on “Make Them Remember,” mocking the four-time NBA champion’s moves from Cleveland to Miami and now to the Los Angeles Lakers. The next verse continues to cut at James (who wears the number 23): “Please stop asking what’s going on with 23 & me, I’m a real n**** and he’s not, it’s in my DNA.”

Their decades-long brotherhood, which included the rapper getting the basketball star tattooed on his arm, severed in 2024 over Kendrick Lamar’s diss track “Not Like Us.” NBA stars like Kevin Durant publicly took Drake’s side, citing their longtime friendship. James, however, did not, and was later seen vibing out in TikTok videos to Lamar’s diss tracks. That culminated in interviews where James had to explain that the two were now in different places in their lives and Drake dropping “Fighting Irish Freestyle” in January 2025 seemingly in response to James’ disloyalty. 

Drake’s new music is the equivalent of a social media post about your friendship drama, but with millions more views. Is it the healthiest way to process the demise of a relationship (or 12)? Not exactly.

“If I really wanted to heal my relationships and my friendships, I probably wouldn’t put it out for 60 million people to be able to feed on,” Dan Griffin, co-founder of The Center for Healthy Masculinity tells Playboy. But Griffin explains, it’s all part of how straight men deal with breakups with their closest friends.

“A bromance is a man’s attempt to find a true connection. When men get their feelings hurt, we feel abandoned, and we have no language for that,” he says. “We have no ability to communicate that. So instead, we get angry. We get vindictive.”

Drake’s new tracks exist within a legacy of rap beefs—and within a legacy of men turning to media to learn masculinity.

“Back in the 80s and 90s you would purchase a cassette tape from NWA and you would play that and that’s how you learned to be a man… not taking shit from anybody,” Dr. Jordan A.Y. Smith who co-founded The Center for Healthy Masculinity with Griffin told Playboy. While Smith admits that a lot of that has changed with artists like Drake and Tyler the Creator who publicly rap about going to therapy or being hurt, there’s still a barrier for men to express themselves. 

“Men are authorized to express anger and disrespect, they’re not authorized to say that also fucking hurt my feelings.”

So how does that change? How does one heal a bromance breakup or find ways to move on without setlists of diss tracks?

For Griffin, who himself lost a “huge friendship” in the past two years, it’s something he’s still working through by talking to others, even if it’s hard to hear the truth. “I’ve had to sit with like, I’m not gonna chase this guy, and I’ll give him his space too. But it also hurts.” 

“We can put up a wall for a while. But we know there’s a world outside the wall,” Smith added. “It takes another friend, a family member, sometimes a therapist to kind of reach out and activate that in us and be like, OK, this is a wall I created. I can get beyond this and reach balance again.”