The success of Nicki Minaj’s single “Super Freaky Girl” motivated her to speed up the release of her new album.
Nicki Minaj indicated her fifth studio album will drop before the end of 2022 in an interview with Jada Pinkett Smith. The diamond-selling rapper divulged her plans when asked about “Super Freaky Girl” reaching No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100.
“It feels so, so, so, so good because everything happened so fast, like the pregnancy and COVID,” Nicki Minaj said. “I wasn’t sure how I was even feeling about having to put out an album this year, but that song happening and people liking it, that made me happy. People have gone through so much recently that they want to have fun. It’ll probably expedite the album to come out this year.”
Nicki Minaj also discussed how “Super Freaky Girl” helped her rediscover her identity as an artist.
“This song came along and because I didn’t approach it in a sexual way, I approached it in a fun way, it’s like I tapped back into who I was,” Nicki Minaj explained. “People might not get this from me, but I was never trying to be sexy, I always was laughing. I think that I can look sexy, but I don’t think of myself as a person that is—you know how some women walk into the room and they’re just like, ‘Ooh.’ I’m not like that.”
She continued, “So because of that, after a few years I had forgotten who I was because I was only reading who people were saying I was. And then it dawned on me like, ‘Wait a minute. When you were saying your sexually explicit lyrics before, Onika, you weren’t trying to be serious. You weren’t trying to turn people on. You were trying to be funny and goofy and stupid. Like, just tap back into you.” You know? And so that’s how I approached “Super Freaky Girl.’”
Nicki Minaj dropped “Super Freaky Girl” in August. She hasn’t released a studio album since 2018’s Queen, which peaked at No. 2 on the Billboard 200.
