Enjoying Drake‘s new album? That’s good because fans aren’t getting another one for a while.
“I probably won’t make music for a little bit,” Drake, 36, said on the Thursday, October 5, episode of his SiriusXM series, Table For One. The third installment of Drake’s program aired hours before Drake dropped For All The Dogs, his eighth studio album and fourth full-length project released in the last two years. While some might take a break from such a prolific streak out of fear of being overexposed, Drake said this hiatus was due to something more important.
“I’m going to be real with you,” he told his listeners. “I need to focus on my health, first and foremost, and I’ll talk about that soon enough. Nothing crazy, but just like, you know, I want people to be healthy in life. I’ve been having the craziest problems for years with my stomach. I’m just saying what it is.”
“So, I need to focus on my health, and I need to get right, and I’m going to that,” he continued. “I have a lot of other things that I would love to focus on. So, I’m going to lock the door [to] the studio for a little bit. I don’t even know what a little bit is. Maybe a year or so, maybe a little longer.”
For All The Dogs marks the end of Drake’s recent creative boom. In 2021, he released Certified Lover Boy, his first album since 2018’s Scorpion, in which he acknowledged the rumor that he was hiding a son. Drake’s child, Adonis, would not only draw the For All The Dogs cover art and appear in the music video for “/,” but he would have a verse on one of the album’s songs.
Less than a year after releasing Certified Lover Boy, Drake dropped Honestly, Nevermind, his house/club-inspired project that got mixed reviews. However, the album spawned the Billboard Hot 100 No. 1 single “Jimmy Cooks”. Five months after Honestly, Nevermind, Drake returned to his hip-hop lane with Her Loss, his collaborative album with 21 Savage. Though Her Loss received worse reviews than Honestly, Nevermind, the album was a commercial success.
For All The Dogs contains Drake’s most recent No. 1 hit, “Slime You Out,” a track featuring his former fling, SZA. The 33-year-old singer briefly addressed the romance while speaking with Rolling Stone. “It wasn’t hot and heavy or anything,” she said.
She and Drake’s brief affair happened in 2009 when she was 18 and he was 21. She waved it off as nothing more than young love. “It was like youth vibes,” SZA told Rolling Stone. “It was so childish.”
