Drake digs deep into his unreleased catalog for surprise compilation album, ‘Care Package’

By every measure of success, Drake‘s 2018 Scorpion LP took his career to new heights never imagined. The decorated Toronto-based rapper was already sitting high atop the thrown of contemporary hip-hop royalty, but Scorpion shattered global record sales with one billion streams in its first week, making him the first and only artist to do so. The album set a record by posting seven simultaneous singles on Billboards Top 10, toppling The Beatles’ half-century-long record of five singles set in 1964.

Now, in seemingly willy-nilly fashion, Drake has released a new compilation album in Care Package. The album arrives as a 17-track surprise package which gathers loose songs and fan-favorite b-sides from throughout his career. The impetus behind the LP offering was to string together the leaked, live, and ripped tracks from Drake’s catalog that were previously never given official release.

Included in that list are lost tracks like the previously-leaked track “Can I,” along with “Dreams Money Can Buy,” which came somewhere down the pipeline between Thank Me Later and Take Care, and “The Motion,” which initially arrived in June 2013 on a SoundCloud four-pack to get fans ready for Nothing Was The Same.

With collaborations with J. Cole, Rick Ross, and James Fauntleroy, Care Package is a blessing to the masses on the one hand. On the other, the compilation could very well set a precedent for other rap artists to begin rounding up their unreleased catalog into one fully-rounded album. Only time and records sales will tell.