drake album cover

Drake's album cover for Certified Lover Boy is confusing the heck out of fans

Drake just revealed what appears to be the Damien Hirst-designed cover art for his soon-to-drop album Certified Lover Boy — and it's effectively just one emoji repeated twelve times over in different colour schemes.

"CERTIFIED LOVER BOY SEPTEMBER 3," reads the caption of an Instagram post shared by Champagne Papi on Monday morning, confirming the highly-anticipated record's release date for the first time since he "hacked" SportsCenter with a cryptic promo on Friday.

The image shows Unicode's Pregnant Woman emoji, as displayed on Apple devices, twelve times: Three horizontal rows all containing four emojis per.

Each woman has a different shirt colour and their skin tones vary to represent the five options available on iPhones, minus the default all-yellow character.

At face value, it seems to suggest that Drake likes many different types of women, but everybody already knows this. What we don't know is how many secret children the artist has actually fathered: Fans didn't learn about the existence of precious little Adonis until the kid was nearly two.

Perhaps coincidentally, perhaps not, Drake confirmed that he had a son (after Pusha T leaked the news) through lyrics on his fifth and most-recent studio album, Scorpion.

Now I'm not saying that Drake is about to reveal he has 11 more kids because of the 12 pregnant emojis on his purported album cover for CLB... but wouldn't that be amazing?

More likely, the round-bellied women represent Drake's affinity for doing things with women which could result in pregnancy — things that lovers do. Certified lovers.

Or maybe the heavily pregnant women are a nod to how late Drake was in releasing his latest work — roughly nine months (CLB was initially scheduled to drop in January of 2021).

Some people are even drawing links between the record's Labour Day Weekend release date and women who will soon be in labour.

Whatever the case, fans of the award-winning Toronto rapper are having fun speculating wildly about what the art means and whether or not it will actually be the cover of Drake's new album.

Some on Twitter are really feeling the idea, especially given the alleged involvement of Hirst, who is tagged in Drake's original Instagram post.

Hirst, an iconic British contemporary artist known for his insanely expensive yet simple-looking work, has not publicly acknowledged the post or confirmed anything, but fans are running with the rumours either way.

Many online are dragging the apparent cover art, however, saying it looks childish...

Cheap...

Derivative...

Out of place...

And perhaps most-painfully of all given Drizzy's (sort of) rivalry with Kanye West, many are saying that the CLB cover is worse than the art for Ye's newly-dropped Donda.

The burn is that Kanye didn't release any art for Donda. The album has no cover.

A lot of people are simply using the image as joke fodder, making and sharing their own modified versions.

It's important to note that, while many outlets are reporting that the pregnant emoji print will be the cover of Drizzy's new album, the artist himself has not confirmed this. He simpy shared the image with a release date for Certified Lover Boy.

If it is actually the album cover, we can expect a whole new wave of disbelief, confusion, and likely disappointment.

"Kanye just has a black album cover, and drake has pregnant emojis," wrote one fan after seeing the post Monday morning. "I'm tired."

Lead photo by

@champagnepapi


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