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When Drake surprise-dropped three albums last week, his friend and frequent producer Gordo was as surprised as everyone else — even though he’d been working on the music for the last year and a half.

“I knew it was going to be two albums,” he tells Rolling Stone on a recent call. “I didn’t know it was going to be three.”

But Drake kept his entire rollout a secret, even from his closest collaborators. That meant that on May 15, when the album trilogy swept the internet, Gordo did what most fans did: He spent time listening through the three projects, which include the anticipated Iceman, the unexpected Habibti, and the left-of-center Maid of Honour, which is where most of Gordo’s songs ended up. The producer/DJ/artist, known for his earlier work on Drake’s Honestly, Nevermind, helped mastermind eight tracks on the LP, including “Hoe Phase,” “Road Trips,” “Outside Tweaking,” “Amazing Shape,” “BBW,” “New Bestie,” “True Bestie,” “Stuck,” and “Goose & the Juice.” (He was also behind “WNBA” on Habibti.)

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But one of the biggest surprises is that even though Gordo shaped up most of the beats with his team, he says Drake ended up going into the production himself and splicing together a lot of the tracks.

“I’m not going to lie to you. As much we worked on them, a lot of these records were done by Drake,” he shares.

“Hoe Phase,” for example, veers into new sonic terrain, morphing into almost an amapiano sound at one point. Gordo says all of that was new to him when he heard the final version.

“We would give him these pieces and then like, the version that I heard on the album was a version I never heard before.”

The same thing happened on [the 2025 $ome $exy $ongs 4 U track] "NOKIA."

“That was a completely different song and then he pieced everything together and I was like, ‘How the fuck did you think of that?’ A lot of the album was like that actually. ‘New Bestie,’ wherever these switch ups are, it’s a lot of him doing these switch-ups. It’s actually pretty crazy,” Gordo says.