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Despite arriving during a time in which it’s increasingly challenging to be a fan, Nicki Minaj’s concert at Seattle’s Climate Pledge Arena last night was, at its greatest, pretty good at making you temporarily forget the grievances you might have had going into the show.

The evening’s emphasis was, naturally, on Minaj’s sprawling new album Pink Friday 2, an LP meant to be something of a spiritual sequel to the 2010 studio album that functioned as her mainstream breakthrough after several years worth of buzzy mixtapes. I’ve struggled to warm up to it since it came out in December. It sounds, to me, a little too thirsty for another “Anaconda” moment-slash-TikTok virality, deploying obvious samples that could sometimes be winning (“Everybody”‘s summery use of Junior Senior’s inexhaustible “Move Your Feet,” “Red Ruby da Sleeze”‘s swaggering repurposing of Lumidee’s “Never Leave You (Uh Oooh, Uh Oooh)”) but more typically prone to making you expaseratedly go “come on” (“My Life”‘s use of “Heart of Glass,” “Pink Friday Girls”‘ dependence on “Girls Just Want to Have Fun”). But the largely smart curation of the setlist, which included the majority of the 22-song-long Pink Friday 2, regularly made you hear the songs anew, prompting, for me, personal questions of whether I should stay loyal to my initial reaction. 

Read the full review on 425.