The Pinkprint

It is not an instant classic, but it is the work that fans who admire Nicki Minaj the rapper, this critic included, have been waiting for her to make.

The Pinkprint is ultimately Nicki’s most cohesive project.

This is a rap royal in full flex. We're lucky to watch the throne.

While it's too early to tell if The Pinkprint is a classic, it's safe to say it's her best album to date. Minaj was finally able to out-rap herself and purge issues she's struggled with in private in her most exposed fashion yet.

The Pinkprint runs a middle path between pop over exertion and real lyricism, creating an everything for someone aesthetic that Nicki doesn't allow to shift into wastefullness. As such, it is an ambitious undertaking Nicki has wrangled in highly entertaining fashion.

Nicki is more personal, more timeless and more connected to her own artistry here, serving some of the most superlative work of her established career on The Pinkprint.

The Pinkprint’s singles underwhelm.... But they’re redeemed by the bonus tracks—a thrilling, confounding six-song set that elevates The Pinkprint from an occasionally transcendent, if unbalanced, break-up album to something far more intriguing.

The PinkPrint is the closest Nicki Minaj has ever gotten to balancing her tendencies, and the furthest she’s ever been from emotional stability.

If the late-add dance track confuses things, it's hard to fault Minaj. Throughout The Pinkprint, she's intent on channeling her talent to explore and document her many moods. The combination is often, if not always, intoxicating.

Tracking and self-editing issues have always plagued her Minajesty's projects, but never more so than on this one, an album that probably would've landed with bigger fanfare had Minaj not so loudly touted it as all but an instant classic all year long.

There's frankly very little chance I'd ever listen to this album again if I wasn't obligated to revisit it in a month via "1 Listen" rules, but Nicki's got her own lane and it's not a lane I'm going to roadblock.

This is a big step forward for the genre, and makes one wish that Minaj's content could be as good as her form, that more attention was paid to crafting complex rhymes and less on floating through halfway conceived tracks in a sing-song burble. Yet even if she hasn't fully nailed the balance between her different modes, at least Minaj is doing something challenging, offering a third different approach on her third album.

An understandable desire to have her traumas understood by everybody inevitably results in a bland mush of melodrama. Despite this, The Pinkprint is Nicki Minaj’s most successful album by a fairly wide margin, as she becomes more empathetic than at any point in the past while Pink Friday’s DMZ between pop and rap becomes little more than a historical footnote in her career.

If The Pinkprint is a letdown compared to The Blueprint, then Minaj brought it on herself. However, as a breakup album that takes heartbreak (or, more specifically, the feeling of having an infinite amount of love to give to an appreciative person) in every direction possible, it provides a template worth imitating.

Had The Pinkprint included 12 songs rather than the extended version's 22, it could have been a classic.

The Pinkprint is her third studio album, and like the first two it’s full of compromises and half-successes.

Disappointingly, Pink hasn’t taken Minaj further into the surreality that first promised to turn her into Missy Elliott to the 10th power. But there’s no denying the album’s catchiness.

The Pinkprint has moments. Some are great, but most are not.

The Pinkprint is let down by some basic conceptual flaws, lackadaisical decision-making and even placing too much faith in bonus tracks to appease the masses

The album features far too many flabby hip-hop/pop and pop songs.

Pinkprint slogs through too many ponderous piano ballads, and it's a shame, because there are moments here that give flashes of that mad brilliance.

After 64 minutes of the same, it all starts to feel like a bit of a grind.

Almost thirty producers were affiliated with the album, yet the music is shockingly simple.