
Although the album was not released that summer, its lead single “Laugh Now Cry Later” featuring Lil Durk was released in August 2020. In the mixtape announcement shared on Instagram, Drake revealed that his sixth studio album, then untitled, would be released sometime in the third quarter of 2020. On May 1, 2020, Drake surprise-released his mixtape Dark Lane Demo Tapes, which was announced mere hours before its release. On August 14, Drake announced the title of the album. On July 29, longtime Drake engineer Noel Cadastre revealed that the album was “90% done”. On another OVOMark live, Drake played two new songs, one an unreleased track titled “Lie to Me” and the other a demo version of his 2020 DJ Khaled collaboration “Greece”. Drake officially announced his sixth studio album just hours before the release of Dark Lane Demo Tapes, and scheduled for release in late 2020. The two snippets were dubbed “I Did” and another snippet with Roddy Ricch was dubbed “In the Cut”. That same month, during an Instagram live, freqeunt Drake producer Boi-1da previewed two snippets of songs with Drake during a Verzuz with Hit-Boy. In March, during an Instagram live session with OVO Mark, he confirmed that a finalized version of the leaked song “Not Around” would be featured on his upcoming album. On December 10, 2019, Drake made a guest appearance at DaBaby‘s concert in Toronto, where he revealed that he was working on the album: “I’ma go back to the crib and try to finish this album up so we can turn up in 2020”. In June 2019, he teased the album via Instagram, where he captioned a post with “Album mode”.

In April 2019, Drake announced at a concert that he had started to work on a new album.
