- Insider ranked all eight of Drake’s No. 1 studio albums, from 2010’s “Thank Me Later” to 2018’s “Scorpion.”
- His sophomore album “Take Care” took the top spot.
- “Nothing Was The Same” and “Scorpion” followed in the top three.
- Visit Insider’s homepage for more stories.
Ever since Drake signed with Lil Wayne’s Young Money label in 2009, he has proven himself a singularly dominant force, reigning over the charts with few signs of stopping.
Put simply, his discography is legendary. Every single project he’s released since his major label debut has shot to No. 1 and outsold anyone’s wildest expectations.
His discography is also highly contentious. Beyond listening to his music on repeat, Drake fans passionately disagree about everything: One person’s favorite Drake album is “easily Drake’s worst” for another.
To make matters even more complicated, Drake has shifted the very ways in which we define and judge albums. He releases record-breaking, studio-quality projects but calls them "mixtapes." Sometimes he calls them "playlists." He reinvents himself so often that it's almost impossible to compare his bodies of work from year to year.
But let's do it anyway. For our purposes, a Drake "album" is anything he released after signing with a major label (which means "So Far Gone" is ineligible. Sorry). Keep scrolling to see them ranked from worst to best.
8. "What A Time To Be Alive"
Drake's 2015 collaborative mixtape with Future was famously written and recorded in just six days, and it shows.
These songs don't quite suit him. Drake takes a backseat throughout the 11-song tracklist, on which much of the production and many of the lyrics are undercooked. From the perspective of a Drake fan, "What A Time" simply doesn't have as much replay value as his other albums.
7. "Thank Me Later"
"Thank Me Later" satisfied both critics and fans at the time of its release. But beyond serving its purpose as a hype-fulfilling studio debut, it falters when compared to Drake's subsequent projects, each one more inventive than his first.
At least no one can accuse Drake of coming out of the gate too strong and never living up to his debut (ahem, The Weeknd).
6. "More Life"
Drake continues to insist that "More Life" is a "playlist," not an album - perhaps as an attempt to exempt it from lists like this one, since it's so difficult to compare to his other works.
The triumph of "More Life" is its ability to absorb many different sounds and spotlight many different artists. With its rich production and fun list of collaborators, it has plenty of bright spots.
But if Drake's most consistent critique is that his albums are too bloated, too long, and too uneven to justify it, then "More Life" fails spectacularly. It doesn't even feel like a Drake album because it's 80 minutes of other artists showing him up, 80 minutes of genres and styles that only work with him as a feature. It lacks a central genius, as well as most of the quirks that make Drake Drake.
5. "If You're Reading This It's Too Late"
For those who stan for Drake as a pure rapper, "If You're Reading This It's Too Late" is the holy grail. It sees him at his most forceful and certainly his most boastful, rapping over minimal beats and industrial sounds for 17 straight songs.
But Drake didn't become Drake because he's a great rapper. I mean, this is a man who actually said, "Got so many chains, I feel like chain-ing Tatum."
Drake can deliver bars, to be sure, but he's at his best when he blends those bars with moody R&B, decadent production, and melodic vocals - when he blends his narcissism with his jealousy, longing, melancholy, and regret, confronting many moods in a way that feels universal.
"If You're Reading This," by contrast, is uncharacteristically and unceasingly paranoid, aggressive, and single-minded. Save for "Know Yourself" and perhaps "Jungle," it lacks that intimate translation of memories and emotions that make people feel connected to Drake the artist, rather than Drake the brand.
4. "Views"
In many ways, "Views" disappointed fans and critics, largely thanks to the feverish hype that led up to its release. Upon first listen, many felt it was bloated and underwhelming.
But in many other ways, it's the best representation of Drake as we know him now: the eclectic, confident, irritated, unabashedly corny, taste-making icon. He spends the entire album "reveling in all his absurdist, quippy glory," as The Ringer's Virali Dave wrote - and that's exactly what we love him for.
The 80-minute tracklist has something for everyone. Drake's purist rap fans have "Hype" and "Still Here." His "Marvin's Room" die-hards got a new crying-in-the-club anthem with "Feel No Ways." And all music listeners should be thankful for the album's string of undeniable bops: "Hotline Bling," "One Dance," "Pop Style," and "Controlla." In short, "Views" holds up.
Three years later, it remains Drake's most divisive project. But for all the ways critics claimed that "Views" was a flop, everyone has sure streamed the hell out of it. It spent more than 100 consecutive weeks on the Billboard 200 chart; it's one of the biggest hip-hop albums of all time. Drake's music offers us plenty to argue about, but numbers don't lie.
3. "Scorpion"
Much of the criticism of Drake's most recent album, "Scorpion," is based on his inability to edit a tracklist. Obviously, "Scorpion" is more sprawling than cohesive, and there were some songs that he could've left on the cutting floor.
But as Rolling Stone's Rob Sheffield writes, "with this guy, way too much is the point."
It would be fair to assume most people don't commit to a front-to-back listen of "Scorpion." It's his longest and arguably most languorous project. But that's just one way to listen to an album - and it's clearly not the way Drake would prefer us to judge his discography.
A lot of music purists would argue that you can't judge an album by cherry-picking its highlights. But that's where we're at right now with Drake: He doesn't care if you don't replay the full album. He only cares if you love pieces of it.
To that point, you'd be hard-pressed to find a fan who doesn't have at least one or two "Scorpion" songs on repeat. The album boasts some of Drake's most likable songs yet, whether it's his genius Mariah Carey homage "Emotionless," his meme-able "In My Feelings," his emo-synth jam "Summer Games," or the ultimate soul-bounce bop "Nice For What."
Plus, there's something to be said for a man who has remodeled the system in his own image and broken multiple Beatles records in the process. His newer albums may be long, but he makes them work in a uniquely Drake-y way.
2. "Nothing Was The Same"
Only Drake could build a tracklist that has a timelessly seductive love song ("Hold On We're Going Home"), career-defining hype anthems ("Worst Behavior," "Started From the Bottom"), emo slow jams ("Own It," "Pound Cake / Paris Morton Music 2"), on top of an audacious six-minute intro ("Tuscan Leather") and somehow turn it into his most focused, sonically cohesive album ever.
"Nothing Was The Same" is a true standout in Drake's catalogue because, as Billboard's Andrew Unterberger writes, "the LP in its entirety is stronger than just its highlights in isolation: It's the Drake album with the most consistent vibe throughout, the one where the songs most feel like they're all stemming from the same moment."
1. "Take Care"
"Take Care" is undoubtedly Drake's masterpiece. It sees him step into his role as the High Priest of our generational oversharing: He's processing his memories in real time, collapsing a myriad of modern experiences and complex emotions into his most immersive album yet.
It can be difficult to remember how risky "Take Care" was for Drake at the time - to release such a self-conscious, gothic record when everyone wanted classic rap songs for the radio.
"Making an album this outré demonstrates a perverse sense of confidence, and also ignores the received wisdom about consistency and incremental change," Jon Caramanica wrote for the New York Times in his review.
"'Take Care' isn't a hip-hop album or an R&B album so much as an album of eccentric black pop that takes those genres as starting points, asks what they can do but haven't been doing, then attempts those things," Carmanica continued. "In the future an album like this will be commonplace; today, it's radical."
He was right. "Take Care" was criticized by Drake's peers who said it wasn't "real rap." Now, it's what you'd put in a time capsule for future generations to understand why rap hasn't been the same since 2011.