Aww, why did you click on this? Is it that FOMO, that fear of missing out?

Hey everyone, Anthony Fantano here, internet's busiest music nerd. Let's talk about today everyone's favorite rapper, multimedia artist, songwriter, Mr. Aubrey Drake Graham. There are so many headlines and news bits coming out of the Drake and OVO camp lately that you would think they're currently fully active on a new album cycle or something like that.

In fact, even some of his fans presumed we might be getting a new record–a fourth record in 2026–when they initially saw this new big FOMO title put up on social media. But as it turns out, FOMO was actually not a new album at all, but actually a very small run of new visuals and new music that are meant to breathe life in the three albums Drake decided to drop earlier this year.

Now, terminally online Drake fans, you might run across on social media, will never, ever, ever admit to you that despite the fact that this man, the biggest artist in many ways, you could argue, in hip hop today dropped three whole ass albums all at once, these records even a year down the road haven't really had much in terms of staying power. Only a few singles and highlights from Iceman remain on the charts currently.

There are a few more from these album cycles that are much further down the line. Seems out of these three records, even though I personally prefer Maid of Honour as well as Habibti, it's Drake fans who really prefer him at his moodiest and most angry and unhappy and vengeful as we hear him on Iceman. Still, there are varying degrees of success being seen by a bunch of different highlights across these records and Drake, I think in his infinite wisdom, decided to center this whole FOMO rollout around those songs by doing what personally I think is his actual real talent and artistic knack.

And that would be his ability to lick his finger, put it up to the wind, and see exactly where it's blowing in terms of knowing exactly how to perfectly release his music or present himself in a way to where it will directly appeal to the most normie and uncritical media consumer that's out there on the internet today.

As increasingly in Drake's career, personally, I see his biggest strokes of genius being showcased when he snaps his fingers and knows exactly how to portray something so that somebody who's, around the intelligence level of a Los Pollos will look at it and be like "Oh!"

Drake understands the exact frequency, the exact wavelength that man's mind operates on, as well as the very large audience of young and impressionable, sometimes like, manosphere-aligned men that he seems to be so beloved by right now.

The actuality of FOMO is that it's just a compilation of visual moments set to the soundtrack of an array of songs from Iceman, from Habibti, from Maid of Honour and just kind of showcases Drake or things that are maybe Drake-aligned in terms of vibes like, just kind of three women having a night on the town in a limo and riding around.

Weirdly enough, that whole section just looks like an advertisement for something, but the product that it's pushing just never shows. But each section of this lengthy FOMO stream, whether it involves Drake or doesn't, looks high production enough to where it's not out-and-out garbage, at least in the first half anyway, but doesn't really have the editing quality or directorial vision that you would need to have to package any of these moments into a bona fide music video. So basically you just kind of string them all together into this lengthy compilation piece, not too unlike all of the, half-baked demo-quality songs that we heard all over Drake's More Life "playlist" so many years ago. This is kind of running along the very same lines as just doing it visually.

Which in concept might sound crazy but when you think about the social media component and how that ties into all of this it makes complete sense from a marketing standpoint. Because while I wouldn't say any of these various sections of the FOMO stream are compelling on their own, when you watch them from beginning to end, many of them, especially the silliest and most outlandish moments break down perfectly into little TikTok and Twitter-sized video clips that could very conveniently come along with a 240-or 500-character post saying, "Oh, Drake goes out to the mall with his goth girlfriend and dresses up goth in front of her and she drools." Viral post: "Drake spent over $100,000 on Iron Man suits and then walked around outside in the Iron Man suit. Why?"

And for a guy whose audience and PR apparatus is so clip-savvy and clip-heavy, it's just the perfect kind of promotional muscle. So while, yeah, I could personally stand back and look at all of this and just kind of see it for how vapid and dumb and boring and uninspired and desperate it is for attention. Simultaneously, these are all things that are successfully getting Drake talked about and posted about repeatedly.

And Drake just knows and understands the average person who's spending all their time on the internet these days looking at random, popular media and celebrity clips and highlights on social media from dusk till dawn. That's exactly the kind of person who he's trying to appeal to.

Now, this FOMO stream wasn't completely visual. There was at least some new music to be had. And of course, he added all of these new tracks to the tail end of Habibti, along with the different sections of FOMO as well; hopefully in an attempt to buoy the streams on that particular album, because with it being the sleepiest of the three that just dropped, it most likely hasn't been getting the most attention.

But yeah, these new tracks that were kind of like shown in parts during the FOMO stream land on this record now in the form of "Classic PT2," "Cold Shoulder," "Quebec," and "Solar Eclipse."

These songs, in my view, are kind of scratching a very similar itch for the most part in terms of them being low quality, not really being good enough to make the original track lists of all of these three albums, even though they were very inconsistent.

First off, there's "Classic PT2," which I actually can commend because it fixes my biggest problem with the original "Classic": that at random at the midpoint, it shifts into this totally garbage sampled outro that honestly is way crappier than the original old school smooth R&B vibes that Drake pulls together in the first half of the song. This "Classic PT2" is like the actual song just brought to a logical end and lasting for more than a minute and a half. Why it wasn't doing that to begin with, I don't know, but at least we have this version now.

Out of these four tracks, I'll also say "Cold Shoulder" is probably the best of the bunch. It's got a solid structure and the vocal parts from respectively Yeba and Don Toliver provide quite a bit of variety to this one, even though it is pretty low-key. But then "Quebec" being the shortest of the four, is maybe the most slapped together. Drake's autotune sounds especially rough on this one, and I have no idea why he saw fit to let this one see the light of day. It just feels so unfinished.

Equally unfinished is "Solar Eclipse," but the kind of nausea-inducing headache about this one is that famously it is that was actually an interpolation of Ella Langley's "Choosing Texas," and I would say a very piss poor one at that, and I say this as somebody who's not even a really huge fan of that song.

Obviously, Drake is singing the melody to the track with very poor autotune and a very skeletal instrumental that is so effortless there's no way him and his team spent more than a few hours on this. If they did, that is absolutely shameful; I'm sorry.

And not only for me is that essentially FOMO in a nutshell, but also, kind of the proof that the joke here–maybe the unintended joke–is that honestly, you're literally missing out on nothing. The overall experience itself is nothing.

The various music videos are nothing. Any clips or bits or pieces of them that were actually worth seeing were most likely plastered all over social media before you, dear viewer, watched the entire FOMO stream, if you even subjected yourself to that. And to add insult to injury, the music added onto the back end of Habibti doesn't even hold a candle to much of the album.

There was like one pretty good one and a track that he shouldn't have fucked up in the first place because for whatever reason, Drake just can't write songs normally anymore. He has to go into like two or three beat switches per cut in order to maintain the attention of his increasingly ADD audience. But yeah, there you go.

Please have no fear of missing out on whatever the hell Drake is doing here.

Anthony Fantano, Drake, FOMO, forever.