Queen is the highly-anticipated fourth studio album by rapper Nicki Minaj. Released on August 10th, 2018, through Young Money Records, and following 2014’s The Pinkprint, the album consists of twenty-two tracks, and focuses on Minaj’s life in the Hip-hop community at a time when she’s not the only successful female rapper dominating the scene.

It is Minaj’s most rap-oriented album to date, with over 77% of the album’s lyrical content consisting of rap. This continues a trend throughout Nicki’s discography with each album carrying a statistically higher rap-density than its predecessor.

The album was first announced on May 7th at the 2018 Met Gala, and Nicki herself confirmed in an interview that the album would be titled Queen, with a planned release date of June 15th:

It’s a big night for me, because I just let the world know that my album is coming on June 15th, and it’s called Queen and I can’t wait!

However, Minaj went on Instagram live on May 25th to announce the pushing back of Queen to August 10. Then, on August 1st, Nicki reported, through Apple Music’s Essentials playlist for Nicki Minaj, that she was pushing back the release date yet again to August 17th, 2018. Queen was eventually released on August 10th, the original day the album was supposed to drop. On June 7th, the cover artwork for Queen was revealed through her social media accounts and Minaj called it her “best work to date”.

On June 10th, Nicki said the following about the album: