It seemed like it could only be a good thing when Timbaland announced he'd taken on Tink as his new protégé last year, signing her to his Mosley Music imprint and revealing that he'd be executive producing her forthcoming debut album. Finally—the big break for Chicago's most criminally slept-on talent (though she hails from south suburb Calumet City), a double threat who'd dropped five good-to-great mixtapes before she'd turned 20. But things got weird quick: specifically, during the Breakfast Club interview where Timbaland recounted a dream in which Aaliyah's ghost told him Tink was "the one." Then came "Million", the capable-yet-creepy single centered around a prominent "One in a Million" sample. The whole thing felt perverse: Timbo dressing up his new muse in his dead muse's clothes. It was hard to ignore the nagging fear that the super-producer was going to smother her.
Tink is not the next Aaliyah; most likely, nobody is. But she doesn't need to be, and in fact, attempting to mold her into Baby Girl the Sequel undersells her extraordinary talents. Despite her girl-next-door demeanor, there was always something mysterious about Aaliyah. At her core, Tink's appeal is that she is very much of this world. She bares her soul completely, putting her most private hopes, fears, and fantasies on paper in hopes of making things a little easier for someone else. Her Winter's Diary series—spanning from her 2012 debut to her latest, Winter's Diary 3—hinges around the loose concept of journaling about a boy that's fucked her entire world up. And as far as Tink's come since that first project, she's very much still that girl in her room, staying up too late stuck in her own head; the tape opens, as the first Winter's Diary did, with the sound of her pen scribbling furiously as she narrates: "It's December 1st, and I met this guy…" (No matter she's dropped it in the height of summer; the Gregorian calendar is irrelevant in Tink's universe, where cuffing season is year-round.)
With WD3, any concerns about her impending debut album should be at least temporarily assuaged. It's a slighter work than last year's Winter's Diary 2, still her best project to date. But it shows her stepping back from the Aaliyah karaoke and the fun but slightly forced single "Ratchet Commandments" to return to what initially made her so compelling: intimate, writerly, and improbably mature R&B, never oversold by her lithe, iridescent voice. Though she's an excellent rapper, her tough, straightforward rap songs on Alter Ego and Boss Up often tended towards the generic. WD3 is the best example yet of her fusing her rapping and singing. On the brief but powerful "Medicine Interlude", she lapses almost imperceptibly between the two. "Look at the flicka the wrist/ I look at the way that you gotta regret every day waking up to your bitch," she seethes, rapid-fire, before slipping into deceptively sweet-sounding song: "Baby you took that L." Her bars give her ballads an essential edge, and her dense, nimble rap delivery often informs the patterns of her sung vocals: on "Jupiter", a slow-burner with a current of Zapp-style space funk, she switches up her flow more frequently than a Young Thug verse.
There's only one Timbaland production here, and it's better than any of their previous collaborations: "L.E.A.S.H.", a quick-and-dirty bad-bitch anthem in the vein of early hit "Bad Girl" that subtly hints at a bass-heavy update of "Indian Flute". "I'ma turn this boy into a man," Tink purrs, and though she's still not old enough to legally drink, I can't help but believe her. But elsewhere, her mentor gets out of her way, giving her space to strengthen her old habits and branch out into new territory. "Very Very Special" is a quintessential Tink sex jam, dirty but subtle, with a Cookin Soul beat that lets its juke-referencing hook ride out into a slow bounce. "Stripclub" is a showcase for Tink's singular knack for empathetic, reality-grounded narrative (and a prime example of why only women should make songs about the plight of sex workers), telling the story of a single-mother stripper without moralizing or patronizing: "Can't nobody judge you/ Make that money, don't let that money make you." But the tape's most promising moment is its closer, "Afterparty", which ends the tape's arc from infatuation to breakup on an optimistic note. It's a weightless, '80s-nodding dance number—practically a freestyle track—and completely unlike anything Tink's released before. If her album's anything like this, we're in good hands.
