The Village Voice's Sean Fennessey viewed that "Kanye is rapping and singing better and with more tenacity than he ever has on Fantasy" and called the album "a staggering, often breathtaking work masterfully engineered and sequenced, each song bleeding over like some long night out into the hazy morning after". Jon Caramanica of The New York Times called West "a better rapper than he’s ever been" and described it as "a startlingly maximalist take on East Coast rap traditionalism". Sputnikmusic's Channing Freeman noted "a zest for life in these songs that is really quite beautiful" and viewed the album as "the first album in which he's truly lived up to his potential in every way - as a rapper, as a lyricist, as a songwriter". Rolling Stone writer Rob Sheffield cited it as West's best album and "his most maniacally inspired music yet, coasting on heroic levels of dementia, pimping on top of Mount Olympus Nobody else is making music this daring and weird". Kitty Empire of The Guardian criticized some of its lyrics regarding "women as ruthless money-grabbers", but ultimately found the album "herculean. The Washington Post's Chris Richards dubbed it West's "masterpiece pure pop bravura, with hip-hop's biggest ego torquing self-obsession into unapologetic new shapes". David Browne of Time cited it as "his most extravagant work congested, constantly bustling" and wrote that it "reasserts the fact that few combine disparate elements as smoothly as West". Steve Jones of USA Today gave the album four out of four stars, calling it "an epic, adventurous aural mélange that easily outstrips anything he's done". Los Angeles Times writer Ann Powers called West's music "Picasso-like, fulfilling the Cubist mandate of rearranging form, texture, color and space to suggest new ways of viewing things". Entertainment Weekly's Simon Vozick-Levinson complimented West's "outrageously hedonistic lyrics" and stated "West has tricked out these tracks with sharper verses and grander instrumental interludes, then lined them up in a sequence that demands to be heard from start to finish essential components of a soundly built structure-easily his most consistently compelling full-length since 2005?s Late Registration". Andy Gill of The Independent gave it five out of five stars and called it "one of pop's gaudiest, most grandiose efforts of recent years, a no-holds-barred musical extravaganza in which any notion of good taste is abandoned at the door". At Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the album received an average score of 94, based on 30 reviews, which indicates "universal acclaim". My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy received general acclaim from music critics. Upon its release, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy received general acclaim from music critics, earning praise for its varied musical style, opulent production quality, and West's dichotomous lyrical themes.
The album produced three singles that attained chart success, including US Billboard hits "Power", "Monster", and "Runaway". Production for the album took place in Diamond Head, Hawaii during 2008 to 2010 and was handled by several record producers, including Kanye West himself, RZA, No I.D., Lex Luger, and S1, among others. My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is the fifth studio album by American hip hop artist Kanye West, released Novemon Roc-A-Fella Records.