Drake and the word "ICEMAN" are inseparable now.
Drizzy has been running with the name since 2024 at this point, finally releasing ICEMAN on May 15 after rolling out a ton of material centered around the concept. There were livestreams featuring custom ICEMAN-branded jackets and trucks, the giant block of ice placed in the middle of Toronto, and the expensive stunt of "freezing" the CN Tower with 75 projectors—some of which were imported from Dubai.
However, one of the most unique personal relics from Drake's ICEMAN era is the custom pickaxe made by Tristan Dare. The 23-year-old Arizona-born artist crafted the piece from fragments of the Muonionalusta meteorite, an otherworldly metal estimated to be more than one million years old and discovered near the border of Sweden and Finland. He has crafted blades and other creations for celebrities including MrBeast, Val Kilmer, Dude Perfect, and now Drake.
According to Dare, the meteorite is "older than Earth" and originated from a planetoid whose molten iron core was blasted into space after a collision with another celestial body before eventually landing on Earth. The rare meteorite spent over a million years frozen beneath Scandinavian permafrost, surviving four ice ages before being unearthed by meteorite hunters using specialized equipment.
Unlike many of the other items associated with the ICEMAN rollout, the pickaxe was rarely seen publicly. Its most notable appearance came in an Instagram Stories update Drake shared while celebrating his chart-topping albums and songs, where he could be seen wielding the custom pickaxe over his shoulder with a giant smile.
We sat down with the young artist to get a closer look at the pickaxe, discuss connecting with Drake, how he created this otherworldly piece, and more.
Who are you?
My name is Tristan Dare, and I am 23 years old. I began crafting at a young age, around 12 to 13, and I loved making things from wood and showing my grandfather who was a woodworker where I got my passion from. I promised myself I would make everything I made at least 1 percent better than the last, so I applied that to the quality of my work and the materials I worked with; and after saving all the money I had from selling my work at craft shows at the time, at 15 years old I bought my first meteorite from Argentina. And from there I devoted everything into learning all I could about this material, and by 17 years old, I was very fortunate to become one of the few people in the world to successfully preserve the crystalline structure in octahedrite meteorite through a forging process.
Since then I have developed my reputation as an artist and have worked with a number of celebrities and collectors alike. At 18 years old I made the MrBeast 50 million plays button award consisting of aluminum, titanium and meteorite; and later the Dude Perfect 50 million award at 19. I’ve exhibited at a number of art galleries including The Art Of Cutlery, The Homo Faber, museums, and [was] voted into the board of members at the Art Knife Invitational in Las Vegas at 20 years old. I am very thankful and honored for the opportunities I’ve had to pursue my passion as an artist and I greatly look forward to what the future holds.
Where are you from?
I am from southern Arizona where I grew up for most of my young life, and later moved to Boise, ID to pursue my passions where I still reside today.
What do you do?
The best way I can describe what I do, is describing “why” I do it. I am deeply inspired by space, the mysteries of where we are, who we are, why we are here and the history of all the things that have come before us. When you look at an ancient fossil, there’s a strange feeling thinking about the fact that this is an organism that walked this Earth the same as we did. There’s a nature to it that is hard to describe, a story, and it opens a door for curiosity to want to know more about this creature, but also all things we haven’t discovered yet. We live in a timeline where we are learning more and more every day, we are becoming so advanced and so sophisticated in how we perceive where we are… I try to capture that moment, bringing the most modern technologies to the most ancient.
When I make a piece, I strive for representing the material as it is. The ancient is appreciated through its beauty in age, as [with] an artist lies the vision of the transformation to the new… Representing the old in redefined beauty of its former life. I want to tell a story. I want the piece to reflect the material, and visually represent the singular idea I’m trying to convey from that perspective. My striving goal is to craft objects that tell a story, represent the material in a way it is preserved and appreciated, and let that work speak for itself in the best way I can.
How did Drake reach out to you about the pickaxe?
I was actually reached out directly by Drake’s personal assistant to create this piece, as they had seen my work before and wanted something custom made for the upcoming album.
What were Drake’s specifications when he gave you the project?
I am actually very thankful, as they trusted me completely with the design and artistic input to make what I felt fit. They had no specifications and left me with full creativity to share ideas and envision the final piece which really opened the door to let it be my best work possible. We actually first started to make a blade that was supposed to look frozen, but the idea about an ice pick came into conversation, and then the direction where we pivoted was immediately decided.
How did Drake find out about your work?
They had seen my work before, and looked into the work I was doing and had reached out a couple years ago to get something of mine in his personal collection.
Did you know anything about the ICEMAN album or concept?
I actually did not! When we were initially discussing the project, we were moving in the direction of making a knife… We were talking about making it a dagger of some kind, and this would be something that would go on display in his house.
But then [Drake’s] assistant said to me “let’s do an ICEMAN handle”. And I laughed a little, but I had zero clue what that meant and showed him a picture of the Iceman comic and asked if that’s what he was referencing. And to my surprise he said “EXACTLY that”.
So then that’s where it bled into the idea of just doing an ice pick, and the direction from there went straight into envisioning how this could not be any ice pick. Blending frozen visual cues, something that looks ancient and dug up, but most importantly, it has to be made from materials that were frozen, ancient, and dug up.
How much did the pickaxe cost?
We have decided to keep that confidential, although I will say that for reference, many of my pieces forged with meteorite range in between $10,000 and $40,000. So that at least gives a subtle idea what this piece is worth.
How long did it take to make the pickaxe?
When we decided we wanted to go the direction of the pickaxe, we really only had less than a week or two to make the piece. The album timelines for filming were coming up quick and we wanted this piece finished for it, so it was crunch time with late nights and early mornings to get her done.
How do you harvest the fragments from the meteor?
I work directly with meteorite hunters and collectors to get my meteorites. For the Muonionalusta meteorite, these specimens are thawing out from frozen permafrost where they sat underground for over a million years, surviving four ice ages and tested through their radioactive isotopes to be one of the building blocks of our solar system; older than Earth, it began as a planetoid that collided with another solar body at some point, shearing open and sending the molten iron core into space before it eventually found Earth. This was the obvious meteorite we wanted to go with, and the process of harvesting this meteorite involves specialty equipment to detect the iron meteorite underground, and then spending hours, sometimes days digging up the meteorite. A total of 40 fragments from this meteor were scattered across a 25-kilometer radius near the border of Sweden and Finland, so we knew if we wanted more for any reason, it wasn’t going to be easy.
What are the biggest challenges creating tools with meteorite minerals?
The biggest challenge is always working with the meteorite. Meteorite is extremely impure, it’s a raw iron from space with rare elements in it that makes it a very complex and fragile material to work with. The Muonionalusta is an octahedrite specimen, meaning it has a special crystalline structure inside the iron that is formed over millions of years of slow cooling in space from a liquid to a solid, creating a special pattern in the metal that cannot be replicated by any technological process in our lifetime. So, the balance is that we knew this should have some level of functionality if Drake wanted to take a swing at some ice at all, so rather than forging it 100 percent from meteorite, I forged the pieces of the meteorite that lacked the crystalline structure, and layered it with carbon steel to fuse into a custom Damascus Steel.
It was then twisted to stretch the layers across the piece, and the pattern you see in the end is the visual difference between the carbon steel (which etches black when exposed to acid) and the meteorite (which is nickel-rich, and remains untouched by the acid).
Can you give us any cool details about Drake’s pickaxe?
Following the theme of the frozen meteorite, I wanted the handle to also be an ancient material of some kind; so that’s where I settled on Bog Oak. If you’re not familiar, this is a type of oak that is over 10,000 years old and has turned completely black from being submerged in a zero-oxygen environment under acidic anaerobic conditions. Also coming from areas struck by frozen permafrost, the entire handle was carved from this oak, where I wanted to still reflect the idea of a visual cue of something “frozen” showing. So, I carved what looked like cracks [or] fragments separating the handle, and filled them with translucent resin that shines a deep frozen blue under just the right light. A subtle but very important detail that tied together the whole piece.
