Drake Won’t Submit His Three 2026 Albums for the 2027 Grammys

LOS ANGELES — Drake is sitting out the Grammy Awards again — this time with three albums’ worth of material. According to an October 5 report from Billboard, the Toronto rapper declined to submit any of his three 2026 albums — ICEMAN, HABIBTI, and Maid of Honour — or any of their songs for consideration at the 2027 Grammy Awards, which take place February 7.

The mechanics matter here. Recordings released between August 31, 2025 and August 28, 2026 were eligible for the 2027 ceremony, and the submission window ran July 7 through August 21. Under Recording Academy rules, a recording that isn’t formally entered can’t be nominated or placed on the ballot — so once the decision is made, it’s final. All three of Drake’s 2026 full-lengths fell inside the eligibility window. None of them will be on the ballot.

The albumHe told us on the album

Anyone who listened to ICEMAN all the way through can’t say they weren’t warned. On the album’s closing track, “Make Them Know,” Drake raps, “This album, I’m never submittin’ it.” Months later, the entry list shows he followed through — not just on ICEMAN, but on the two albums released alongside it.

It’s worth pausing on the scale of what he’s leaving on the table. The trio made Drake the first artist in Billboard 200 history to occupy the chart’s top three positions simultaneously, with ICEMAN debuting at No. 1 on 463,000 equivalent album units, HABIBTI entering at No. 2 with 114,000, and Maid of Honour opening at No. 3 with 110,000, per BallerAlert’s rundown of the numbers. That’s not a catalog play or a legacy exemption. That’s one of the biggest commercial weeks of the year, voluntarily kept out of the biggest awards race in music.

The historyA decade of distance

This is not a new posture. Drake also declined to submit 2018’s More Life, 2021’s Certified Lover Boy, and 2022’s Honestly, Nevermind for Grammy consideration — a throughline of skepticism toward the Recording Academy that has now stretched across nearly a decade.

He’s not alone in it, either. The Weeknd pulled his music from consideration in 2021, citing the organization’s “secret committees,” then returned to the Grammys stage in 2025 to perform in support of Hurry Up Tomorrow — which, in a twist the Academy probably didn’t plan, earned zero nominations. Frank Ocean and Zach Bryan have made similar moves in recent years. The opt-out is becoming its own kind of statement, and the statement is: the trophy doesn’t validate the work.

The falloutThe Kendrick layer

The timing gives this particular opt-out a sharper edge. Kendrick Lamar’s “Not Like Us” — the diss track at the center of the most consequential rap beef of the decade — won five Grammys at the 2025 ceremony, including Record of the Year and Song of the Year. Drake remains in litigation with his own label, Universal Music Group, alleging the company promoted Lamar’s track despite lyrics he says are defamatory — with his lawyers specifically citing performances of the song at the Grammys and the 2025 Super Bowl halftime show.

Read against that backdrop, the decision to withhold three albums reads less like indifference and more like a position. The Academy celebrated the song he’s suing over. He’s not asking it to celebrate him back.

The numbersThe numbers argument

And then there’s the scoreboard Drake actually seems to care about. He finished September as Spotify’s most-streamed rapper with 1.67 billion streams across all credits — his 19th consecutive month holding the title, per figures circulated by HipHopAllDay and RapTV. The monthly 2026 rundown tells the story: Drake topped every single month, from 1.6 billion in January to a 2.7-billion peak in May.

That’s the argument he’s been making about awards for years, rendered in data: the audience already voted. The Grammys are a room of voters; the streams are a census.

The aftermathThe ‘Ja Rule’ test

DJ Akademiks — who has never hidden his allegiance — framed the stakes of the post-beef era in stark terms during an October 5 appearance on No Jumper. “If Drake ended up being Ja Rule, I looked at that as the end of me,” he said, invoking the shorthand for what happens to a star who loses a defining feud. He traced his mindset to advice Donald Trump Jr. once gave him in an interview: “No matter if you’re Team Kendrick or Team Drake, just make sure you’re on the winning side.”

Akademiks’ definition of winning became making sure the artist he backed could survive what came next — and he pointed to receiving an OVO chain engraved with “THE WAR IS OVER” as the moment the mission felt complete. Whatever the Grammys decide about rap’s biggest commercial force, the apparatus around Drake is signaling that the war chapter is closed.

The fieldWho carries the rap categories now?

Drake’s absence leaves a real question hanging over the 2027 rap categories. BTS and Stray Kids are also sitting out — part of a backlash to the Grammys’ new Best Asian Pop Music Performance category that has divided K-pop’s biggest names. And on the hip-hop side, reports noted that Kendrick Lamar, Clipse, and Tyler, The Creator had no eligible releases in the window — which raises the question of who, exactly, anchors the genre’s categories this cycle.

Academy member Chris Anokute — formerly a senior vice president at Universal Music Group and Epic Records — dismissed talk of a hip-hop commercial decline as “fake news,” arguing the softness has more to do with the changing streaming landscape than the genre’s popularity. But he acknowledged the genuine concern underneath: the lack of new stars on the level of the 2010s breakouts — Drake, Young Thug, Future — who defined the last era.

Grammy nominations arrive later this year, and the ballots will tell their own story about where hip-hop stands with the Academy. Drake’s position, meanwhile, is already on the record — twice, if you count the album closer. He told the Academy he wasn’t submitting. Then he didn’t. In an industry built on campaigning for trophies, the refusal to campaign is the whole message.