By the time her eighth mixtape, Voicemails, arrived in 2019, the Chicago singer and rapper born Trinity Laure’Ale Home had spent the better part of a decade as a singular talent in the dual spheres of hip-hop and R&B. The 12-song project came in the wake of parting ways with her former label Epic, which shelved her debut album—initially slated for release in 2015—after releasing only a couple of singles. Voicemails was the first long-form project Tink had made fully on her own terms since her signing. It sounds very much like the work of a now-seasoned artist spreading her wings and trusting her own voice. The mixtape is emblematic of the style Tink had been solidifying across her stray tapes and EPs of the late 2010s: emotionally nuanced accounts of dissolving relationships, articulated in modes from pugilistic to heartsick to everything in between. On Voicemails, she situates these themes within the context of a loose concept project, told from the perspective of an alter ego named KeKe, trying to choose between two men representing very different archetypes. These are her self-absorbed and sporadically unfaithful partner, DeShawn, and her inviting fresh love interest, Chris. Like dialogue breaks in a musical, the narrative is told with the help of voicemail interludes. The songs meditate unsparingly on indecision, lust, frustration and guilt. Tink emerged against the landscape of her home city’s drill scene in the early 2010s, and the moments on Voicemails where she employs rap flows in that lineage are some of its highlights. The bouncy, vindictive “Stabbed in the Back” leads off with a rapid-fire flow, competing for space with fibrillating trap hi-hats; it features both the project’s strongest one-liners and its most indelible melodic hook. Voicemails’ most popular export is the sensual anthem “Ride It”, connecting Tink with fellow Midwesterner and R&B street-rap double threat Dej Loaf. Closing track “Falling in Love” contains the record’s most vulnerable and celebratory bars while failing to clarify which man KeKe is addressing, ultimately, as the “real thing”.