Last year, Tink stumbled into a revelation. The 27-year-old singer and rapper had tended to let her music marinate, meticulously poring over production details and lyrics before finalizing a project. But when she began working with producer and fellow Chicago-native Hitmaka, he challenged her to churn out songs at a faster clip. Within two months Tink completed an album: Heat of the Moment, a satin-smooth R&B record that instantly stood out as her freest and most sensual album in years. For a singer whose career had been burdened by out-of-pocket Aaliyah comparisons and unfortunate label drama, and whose work often arrived with clunky conceptual frameworks, this revised workflow felt like a healthy and exciting new direction for one of R&B’s most overlooked talents.
Tink’s latest offering, Pillow Talk, fine-tunes her collaborative chemistry with Hitmaka and further establishes the pair as one of R&B’s premier singer–producer teams. The album seamlessly flits between steamy slow jams and pristine pop songs, its architecture indebted to the opulence of ’90s R&B. Hitmaka’s glossy, pillowy production weaves trap and electronic elements into classic-sounding soul, giving Tink the ideal backdrop to flaunt her effortless, confident flows. She’s a nimble vocalist who blurs the line between singing and rapping; even when she’s crooning big ballads, there’s a sleek bite to her cadences, her vowels gliding so smoothly it’s like they’ve been greased. Pillow Talk is full of simple, irresistible pleasures: gorgeous beats and catchy hooks, reckless sexual escapades, melodies that glue themselves to your brain. Though occasionally overindulgent, Pillow Talk is undoubtedly a vibe, a record that balances the joys of intimacy with the unexpected consequences.
Across Tink’s catalog—eight mixtapes, two EPs, and three albums over 11 years—she’s experimented with a variety of narrative scaffolding to help give her projects shape. These have included voicemail interludes, diaristic preambles, and a misconceived talk therapy conceit, none of which played to her strengths as a raunchy, shit-talking hitmaker. Thankfully, on Pillow Talk, she abandons her concept-album ambitions and simply writes fun, dramatic songs about romance. There’s no arc, just a collage of emotive moments. In mid-album highlight “Mine,” Tink admonishes her man’s side chick for overstepping; “25 Reasons Interlude” is an unabashed love letter to monogamous bliss. Two of the strongest songs, “Switch” and “Opposite,” express skepticism about a guy’s credentials as a life-partner: “I’m hoping that God forbid/That you’re not a product of your past/We can have that shit that last,” she sings on “Opposite,” an edge etched in her voice. Mostly, though, Tink spends her time here burning up the sheets. On “Throwback,” which adds to the rich tradition of R&B songs about having sex to other R&B songs, Tink sounds totally liberated, while on “Drunk Text’n,” she seems devoured by desire.
Pillow Talk’s incessant hornieness can veer into unintentional comedy; two songs, for instance, have the word “cum” in the title. The most glaring hiccups, though, are when Tink leans too heavily on ’90s and 2000s R&B tropes. Take the clumsy 2 Chainz feature on “Cater,” which sounds like a check being cashed in real time, or the G Herbo-assisted “Ghetto Luv,” which recycles the played-out bad-boy-meets-bad-girl hip-hop/R&B crossover formula. These drawbacks, though, don’t meaningfully distract from Pillow Talk’s palatial glamor. Behind Hitmaka and company’s elegant production, Tink depicts the highs and lows of love with a swaggering nonchalance. Even when an old flame calls her up late at night, she’s not too proud to admit that she’s intrigued by the proposition. “Trying not to make it something/But I’ve been dealing with a lot,” she sings on “Goin Bad.” And who can blame her? She sounds like she’s finally having fun, letting her art follow wherever the night leads her.
