IMY2

IMY2 — Drake Featuring Kid Cudi

Two Paths Cross in the Pandemic's Long Shadow

The summer of 2021 carried a particular emotional weight. Eighteen months of disrupted normalcy had left popular culture hungry for music that acknowledged complexity, and two of the most psychologically candid voices in modern rap were already thinking along similar lines. Drake and Kid Cudi had operated in different corners of the hip-hop world for over a decade, their artistic approaches sharing certain melancholic frequencies while diverging sharply on matters of style and intent. IMY2 brought them together at a moment when both artists were processing themes of longing, distance, and the accumulated cost of absence.

Kid Cudi's influence on Drake has been acknowledged within the broader discourse around Drake's emotional openness as a rapper. Where Kid Cudi helped pioneer the model of male vulnerability in hip-hop, cataloging anxiety and loneliness in a way that gave permission to an entire generation of artists who followed, Drake absorbed and commercialized that permission, making introspective rap a genre-defining mode rather than an outlier. Their collaboration on IMY2 was therefore not just a pairing of two big names but a meeting of an influence and the influenced.

Certified Lover Boy and the Album Context

IMY2 appeared on Drake's sixth studio album, Certified Lover Boy, released in September 2021. The album was one of the most anticipated releases of that year, arriving after extensive public speculation about its content and after Drake had navigated a period of intense personal and professional scrutiny. The LP debuted at number one and generated an enormous number of charting singles simply through the breadth of its tracklist and the size of Drake's fanbase, which by 2021 was large enough to chart nearly any album track through streaming volume alone.

Kid Cudi, meanwhile, had been on his own complex artistic journey in the preceding years, releasing work through Passion, Pain and Demon Slayin' and Entergalactic that deepened his reputation as an artist committed to emotional authenticity even when critical reception was mixed. His appearance on IMY2 was welcomed by fans of both artists as an overdue intersection of two career arcs that had long seemed destined to cross more explicitly.

The Chart Moment

IMY2 debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 on September 18, 2021, at number 22, a strong initial placement that reflected both the album's blockbuster streaming performance and the specific enthusiasm around this collaboration. The following week it dropped to number 72 as the broader Certified Lover Boy tracking period settled and listeners' attention distributed across the album's many other tracks. Two weeks on the chart represents a brief but meaningful commercial presence, particularly given the fiercely competitive environment created by the album's own tracklist.

The challenge for any individual track on a Drake album release is precisely this: the sheer volume of charting content means that each individual song competes not only with the broader marketplace but with its own siblings. Certified Lover Boy placed more than 20 songs on the Hot 100 simultaneously in its debut week, a feat made possible by the streaming era's methodology for chart tabulation. In that context, landing at 22 with a collaborative deep cut was a genuine achievement.

Kid Cudi's Contribution

What Kid Cudi brings to IMY2 is tonally distinctive. His approach to melody in rap has always been somewhat unconventional, leaning into humming and melodic improvisation in ways that create texture rather than simply delivering lyrics. On this track, his presence shifts the emotional register, adding a rawness that contrasts productively with Drake's more polished delivery. The dynamic between the two performers creates something with more emotional range than either might have produced alone on this particular subject matter.

The title itself abbreviates "I Miss You Too," and the track is unambiguous about its emotional subject: the ache of distance from people and moments that once felt central. Given the context of its release during the extended pandemic recovery period, those themes arrived with particular force.

Longing Preserved in Sound

In the catalog of both artists, IMY2 occupies a specific niche: a collaborative statement of emotional openness between two of the artists most responsible for normalizing that openness in hip-hop. The approximately 7.5 million YouTube views it has accumulated reflect ongoing discovery by listeners drawn either to Drake's vast back catalog or to Kid Cudi's devoted fanbase, many of whom treat his collaborations as events worth seeking out regardless of context.

Press play and hear two architects of modern emotional rap meeting in the space they both, in different ways, helped create.

"IMY2" — Drake Featuring Kid Cudi's singular moment on the 2020s charts.