Nicki Minaj and Lil Uzi Vert's New 'Pink Friday 2' Song Is Your Soundtrack to all Winter Functions

One of the most fun aspects of listening to an album for the first time—a pop album, that is, one destined to dominate discourse and awareness about as much as anything can in today’s monoculture-lite times—is landing on the track that immediately announces itself as The One. That title can be a little subjective, referring to the song that’s going to be a capital-h Hit or just the moment that’s going to garner the lion’s share of acclaim and excitement. (In some cases, those factors are mutually exclusive.) But it’s a sensation that’s surged in the last decade or so; as artists have held onto their albums more tightly, sometimes as surprise drops or small-window rollouts with barely any lead singles, the berth for simultaneous discovery has widened.

Enter Pink Friday 2, the new Nicki Minaj album, which anyone who isn’t chronically online could be forgiven for not being aware of. Despite announcing the project at the top of the year, and the excitement inherent to that (a sequel to her beloved debut album), Nicki hasn’t done much more than use Twitter to keep momentum for the project alive. Sure, she hosted the VMAs back in December and used that space to debut two new songs that seemed very promising, but this time last week even her rabid fanbase of Barbz wasn’t quite sure if she was actually going to meet her promised Dec 8th drop date.

Well, Nicki’s fifth album, her first since 2018, is finally, actually here, and it is a deeply solid return to form from one of rap’s most important artists. It’s not unfair to say Nicki's seemed a little lost for these last five years, dropping singles of varying impact and quality here and there (whither, her excellent Fivio Foreign-assisted drill cut “We Go Up”), clearly still working out how to reassert herself in a landscape that’s now traffic-jammed with drivers she helped pave a lane for. PF2 has all of the Nicki album staples: from Young Money reunions (“Needle,” “RNB”) to mean-mug Queens tough talk (“Barbie Dangerous”) to ballads (“Nicki Hendrix”) to a stealth “Super Bass” sequel (“Pink Friday Girls”), to that one super-pop track that we all agree could’ve been cut (looking at you, “Cowgirl”).

But, as for The One? That title unquestionably, unanimously goes to track 11, “Everybody,” which pairs Minaj up with Lil Uzi Vert for what’s now their third or fourth collab. Be prepared, reader: you’re about to hear this song everywhere, as the soundtrack to endless Tiktoks and the setting for any wintertime function. This is a good thing: it’s an absolute heater.

For one, it’s built around a bonkers sample that should be goofy on paper but absolutely works against all odds, a tension some of the best pop songs carry. Somewhat similar to Uzi’s smash 2022 hit “Just Wanna Rock,” the track takes cues from the Jersey House club movement, slicing and dicing none other than Danish pop duo Junior Senior's 2002 dance classic “Move Your Feet” into a double-time banger Nicki effortlessly dances over. (It kind of recalls Drake and 21 Savage’s album cut from last year “Circo Loco,” which is not Jersey Club but still features an unexpected dance track flip in Daft Punk’s “One More Time.”)

“Everybody” has all the makings of a party pleaser: high energy, an earworm of a sample, and deceptively simple lyrics, with Nicki and Uzi punching each line in on Junior Senior’s all-too-familiar mewl of “Everybody-y-y.” It’s the kind of song where a casual listener doesn’t need to know what the hell Nicki’s talking about to have fun, but the rest of us can appreciate the demented thrill of her spitting things like “We gon' spin and kill [Everybody!]”—threatening drive-bys, by way of one of early-aughts club music’s most earnest feel-good hits.

Nicki and Uzi have only collaborated a handful of times, but their chemistry is undeniable. As Uzi told me this past summer, “There’s no missing when I make a song with her.” That track was “Endless Fashion” on Uzi’s album Pink Tape; it was the last song made for the album, spurred by Nicki hitting Uzi just days before its release. “Nicki hit me up like, ‘How you going to drop an album called Pink Tape and you know pink is my thing?’ I was like, Oh, no. You right. I'm going to send this over right now. And I sent it to her right there.”

Despite the success of “Just Wanna Rock,” Uzi chose not to revisit the Jersey Club lane until this new song now. “That's really not my lane,” Uzi admitted to me. “There's a lot of kids out here, that's really their thing. It's kids from Philly, people like 2Rare, D Sturdy, Brock, Bril, Lay Bankz, MCvertt—it's just a bunch of them, and that's what they do all day long. I already paid my homage to how I did my thing, but I would think it would be almost disrespectful to box them out when that's what they do every day.”

“Everybody” is co-produced by one such stalwart, DJ Smallz 732, whose Junior Senior flip was first posted at least eight months ago. But it also shares production from Tate Kobang, who’s surprisingly PF2’s quiet secret weapon, with credits on four other songs. The Maryland rapper scored a modest hit back in 2015 with his Baltimore-bounce influenced track “Bank Rolls,” but never quite took off after. It’d be even more surprising if instead of just serving as Nicki’s grand return, this album somehow facilitated a resurgence for Tate, who always seemed more talented than his short run back then allowed.

He’s the last person one would’ve expected to be all over the Nicki Minaj comeback album, but Pink Friday 2 is full of zigzags. (I’m sorry, but the much heralded Drake and Nicki reunion should’ve prioritized BARS; instead we get Drake in full Turks mode, sigh.) We all need to sit with the album over the weekend, but on first impression, two things are clear: However the album stacks up against her others, or what’s out there now, Nicki silenced a lot of longstanding doubt. And “Everybody” is an undeniable jam. The winter just got a little warmer!