Nicki Minaj’s superpower is her means to adapt. In her 16-year profession, she’s been a for-the-streets mixtape queen, a chrome-pink pop star, an empowered groundbreaker, and—utilizing her formidable theater abilities—a chameleonic character rapper, morphing into personas like Harajuku Barbie, Tyrone, Chun Li, and the beloved Roman Zolanski, all with the wittiest wordplay this aspect of Lil Wayne.

The unique Pink Friday—her first album after a string of phenomenal mixtapes within the late 2000s—shifted the business upon its launch in 2010, proving that she might weave a tapestry together with her characters, sing her face off, and that sexist rap purism can be left in her mud. Nicki the Boss set data, grew to become a worldwide famous person, and casually shattered the male-rapper stronghold on the mainstream in a method that hadn’t been carried out for the reason that heyday of Lil Kim and Cunning Brown. For all of the belated recognition and chart dominance of girls rappers right this moment, it’s plain that Minaj was the start of a sea change. She was the blueprint for girls rappers who didn’t need to be female mirrors of their male patrons, however might stand on their very own.

Pink Friday 2 goals to conjure and construct on that second in time, and to remind us—her followers, her haters, her mortal enemies—what she’s carried out for rap, particularly girls in rap. Like the unique, Nicki masters the artwork of the short change, leaping from persona to persona, style to style, placing her signature cadences on drill, pop, dancehall, afrobeats, R&B, Jersey membership, and lure. But apart from just a few wonderful tracks and verses peeking by, this 22-song album—not like 2018’s Queen and even 2014’s bar-setting The Pinkprint—falls aside fairly shortly. Whereas Minaj remains to be rapping valiantly—particularly as Pink Ruby Da Sleeze, a brand new persona launched on the Diwali riddim-sampling single of the identical identify—the album’s intention is muddled by its scattershot manufacturing, which sounds much less like style innovation and extra like an insidious ploy to worm its method into as many crevices on TikTok as potential.

It didn’t need to be this fashion! Pink Friday 2 consists of tracks about her emotional fortitude, her Trini and Caribbean pleasure, her unfuckwithable armor, and intimate reflections on her life. On the affecting album opener, “Are You Gone Already,” a Finneas manufacturing that samples Billie Eilish’s “when the get together’s over,” she grapples with the ache of studying her father was killed by a hit-and-run driver in 2021, and displays on her accountability and love as a mom. She flexes her agility on tracks like “Beep Beep” and “Barbie Harmful,” which conjure the a lot beloved Mixtape Nicki: the latter interpolates Biggie’s “Infamous Thugs” and consists of the road, “Identify a rapper that may channel Huge Poppa and push out Papa Bear/Ho, I’m mom of the 12 months.” Or on “RNB,” an in any other case middling monitor with Tate Kobang and Lil Wayne the place she raps, “I maintain his secrets and techniques/I let him beast it/Kissin’ on my thighs and my breast/He two-pieced it.” But on the identical tune, when Wayne raps, “’Bout to purchase a pretend booty for a real-ass bitch,” it’s an odious reminder that Minaj felt pressured to get ass pictures in the beginning of her Younger Cash profession—an instance of context seeping into, and souring, the music.